¶ Trees
Index Entry
Trees:
"take enormous wind shock loads. They gases are contained, but yet they distribute the loads. The minute you freeze the tree up-- off goes the branch! Because it can’t distribute its loads.
"This is very much the way nature has designed you and me… using this water to distribute the loads. And that’s why we have to have this 98.6 degrees so we’re not going to freeze up. And there are very limited conditions where the humans and the trees really can operate, but nature is able to do it on board of our planet within the biosphere. Hydraulics are a very good way… they are incredible!
"Whereas man-- in the Stone Age-- would go through millions of years in compression. Even though masonry has an ultimate, or limit, compressive strength of about 50,000 pounds a square inch, while masonry in tension is only about 50; so it’s been built 1000 times stronger to resist in compression than in tension. And that’s the way man learned to pile that stone up…
“So I began to see that this hydraulics and pneumatics-- the crystallines-- had never been in the building arts at all. And so I’ve gotten into tension continuities with tensegrity structures!”
