[kstar]

Originally Posted by DARISC

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Check this out:

Kenneth Snelson, born 1927 in Pendleton, Oregon, said "my art is concerned with nature in its primary aspect, the patterns of physical forces in three dimensional space." Snelson was fascinated by "the infinite perfection of connections" holding everything together. His curiosity about the structure of matter led him to study the two fundamental weave patterns: two-way fabric weave, forming squares, and three-way basket weave, forming triangles and hexagons. Favouring the three-way weave, which is infinitely more stable, he developed three-dimensional weave cells. These self-contained structural units, which he used as the components of his sculptures, consist of tubes and cables - rigid compression tubes pushing outward, held together by flexible tension cables pulling inward. These polyhedral units could be stacked together making larger "floating compression structures" which still maintained the characteristics of a single unit. The dynamic balance between the inward pull of the cables and the outward push of the tubes, which appear to float within the network, gives them enormous structural integrity, maintaining their shape in apparent defiance of gravity, whether vertical or horizontal. His Needle Tower is made from these components.

Although Snelson came up with the concept of tensegrity, it was Robert Buckminster Fuller who coined the term. The two met in 1948, when Snelson was in art school at Black Mountain College in North Carolina. They shared an interest in the geometry of structure, and when Snelson showed Fuller his early X piece, Fuller immediately saw the potential of this principle of opposing tensional and compressive forces, coining the term "tensegrity" (tension integrity).

A bio on Fuller follows the above.

Excerpt of that:

Fuller was developing the dome at the same time that Snelson was creating his tension-vectored sculptures, both different aspects of tensegrity. The geodesic dome is a tensegrity structure with an "exoskeleton" of struts on the outside, which are under both compression and tension. The compression and tension elements can be separated by "jitterbugging" the struts from the outside to the inside, resulting in Snelson's tension-vectored, "floating compression" forms, with an "endoskeleton" of compressive struts which no longer touch each other. In the same way, a rigid icosahedron can be transformed into one which is tension-vectored.

Tension-vectored forms provide discontinuous compression in a matrix of continuous tension. The tension is continuous both in space (i.e. all tensional elements connect) but is also in time, as it is permanently pre-stressed, exhibiting "pre-tension". This is the ingredient which provides great strength relative to the actual weight and substance of the structure. When the structure is under load (including gravity), the stress is shared throughout the tension network, making the whole stronger than its separate parts. Furthermore, the greater the load, the greater the tension and therefore the greater the strength.

Transforming the geodesic form into a tension-vectored form makes the structure much more dynamic. By now it should be clear that this model has more application to the human body than any structure made of columns and beams. Ida Rolf saw its potential, and worked with Fuller in the 60's and 70's. She treated the body "as if" it were a tensegrity structure, and there are a number of articles written by Rolfers at that time.

http://www.intelligentbody.org.uk/edavies.php

Obviously two smart dudes.