Tensegrity: A New Scale

Over the past two quarters I have learned an incredible amount about tensegrity, perhaps most importantly that it is very difficult to achieve. I have always been interested in structural systems, and this is one of the most intriguing because of how interconnected every single piece is, even though the compression rods actually never touch each other. My bamboo materials proved to be much too difficult to use, and over the past few weeks I have struggled to make the tensegrity happen. In the past few days I have decided instead to try the tensegrity first at a smaller scale, and in fact the material choice, pencils, allowed for an interesting meaning to be attached to the form.

The above image shows how the tensegrity sculpture looks flattened out in the construction process. As you can see, each pencil has three strings attached to each end. On each layer there are four pencils each angled 45 degrees, and when going up one layer the pencils are shifted half a string and angled the other way. After tying all the strings onto the pencils I then wrapped each layer unto itself and connected the final strings. A little tweak here and there, and suddenly the form sprung to life.

This is one of those examples of why I consider structural engineering to be an art. When something stands with an elegance of mechanics like a tensegrity sculpture, it is essentially comparable to magic. I feel that when art demands your attention and never leaves your memory, it has done its job.

I thought about what the pencil structure meant to me, and the first thing I thought about was writer's block. The chaos of the form made me feel as if creativity were being locked in an invisible prison. I put a piece of paper under the form and the metaphor became clear.

Then I put it on my head and I thought, maybe this is exactly the opposite of writer's block. Maybe it's a symbol of imagination, the sprouting of ideas. I feel content with both of these images and invite you to consider other meanings for tensegrity, at different scales and with different materials. I plan to buy stronger rope and create a bamboo version that stands at least ten feet high. I was considering lining all the rope with artificial vines to create a form that suggests an intelligence in nature's design. This just goes to show how artistically flexible engineering and structure can be.