¶ Tensegrity: Wire Wheel
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Index Entry
I found that nature was not using that primarily structural logic. In our solar system the Earth is not touching and ball-bearing around on the Moon’s surface. They cohere gravitationally and remotely. And in the atoms the energy components are equally remote from one another. I found that nature is using what I call continuous tension and discontinuous, islanded compression. Man’s first discovery of that was when he made the wire wheel with a compressional hub as the counterpart of Earth with rim corresponding to the Moon’s encirclement of the Earth with the spokes corresponding to the gravity which coheres the two islands of compression only by tension.
I find then that it is possible to make structural units which are only held together by tension. I call these clearly differentiated tension-compression structural tensional integrities, or tensegrity structures.
¶ Citations
- Tel Aviv Address, Dec '67
