790.10 Definition

790.11 Everyone thinks he knows the meaning of the word structure. We point to a stone wall or a bridge or a barn and say, “That’s a structure.” What is common to a steel bridge, a wooden barn, a jumbo jet, an iceberg, a starfish, a star, a fern, a diamond jewel, an elephant, a cloud, and a human baby? They are all structures. Some are more versatile than others; some last longer than others. Why? Why do the stone or wood or steel cohere at all? If we understood a little more about structure, it could lead to a better understanding of the political and economic dilemmas of our time. Political and economic systems are structuresoften so ill-conceived as to require constant local patching and mending. Even structural engineering has as yet failed to comprehend adequately or to define and cope with structure.

790.12 We all have experiences of pushing and pulling, and we think of them as 180-degree experiences directly away from us or toward us. But (as we shall soon discover) pushing and pulling both produce 90-degree resultants, which we mistakenly call “side effects.” Our side effects are nature’s primary effects, and vice versa. Pushing is outwardly explosive from a center of effort; that is why a ping pong ball can ride on the parting outward and downward of the waters of an only-vertically-aimed fountain nozzle. Gravity and magnetism are embracingly contractive aroundand radially inward towarda center of gravity. With gases, pull is a partial vacuum whereas push is an explosion: attraction vs propulsion, tension vs compression,

790.13 Tension and compression always and only coexist and covary inversely, We experience tension and compression continuously as they interaccommodate the eternally intertransforming and eternally regenerative interplay of the gravitational and radiational forces of Universe.

790.14 The gravitational or omnidirectional tension totality in Universe is quantitatively equal to the totality of the radiational or explosive compression of Universe, but the sum total of tensional coherence is more effectively arranged than the sum total of explosively disintegrative forces. This is why Universe is finite. (See Sec. 231.)

790.15 Barrel: A barrel as the sum total of its staves and its encircling hoop bands illustrates the cosmic gravity-vs-radiation balance. (See Figs. 705.01-.02.) The staves are wedgeseach stave is wedged between two other truncated-triangle wooden staves. When seen in cross-section, each stave is the outer-arc-chord-truncation segment of a long, thin, isosceles triangle whose inner, sharply pointed section truncated and dispensed withwould have had its apex at the central axis of the barrel. Each stave’s outer chord is always a little wider than its inner chord, wherefore the staves cannot fall inward of one another but could very readily move outwardly and apart, were it not for the tension bands that go completely around the barrel and close back on themselves as a finite integrated system.

790.16 The staves are separate, disassociative, inherently disintegrative, and self-differentiating, while the barrel’s external ring-bands are self-integrating. though separate, the two groups of members are operating complementanly to produce union. It is the embracing tension that successfully maintains the integrity of the barrel despite the disintegrative tendencies of the individual staves. The push-pull components are more effective associatively than they are separately. The disintegrative explosive force is embracingly cohered by the gravitational. So it is with Universe.

790.17 Push and pull, disassociative and associative in omnidirectional balance, characterize the essence of structure.

790.18 Column. If you load the top center of a thin column, it tends to bend like a banana its radius of curvature in the bending area gets smaller and smaller. (See Fig. 640.20.) A tensed line tends to get straighter and straighter, though never absolutely straight. Physics has not found any straight lines. Physics has found only wavesthe superficially straighter waves being of ever higher frequency and ever shorter wavelength, and always locally and discontinuously particled.

790.19 Compression tends to break a slender one-wavelength column into two columns of two wavelengths, thus tending to focus the ever smaller radius between them into one point, which increases the leverage of either half to consummate the breakage. (See Fig. 640.20G.)

790.20 By contracting their girth, tensed lines of tension tend to pull their fibers together ever more tightly so that the atoms get nearer to one anothertheir mass interattractiveness increases as the second power of the decrease in the distance between the atoms. (See Fig. 641.01B.) Tensional strength increases initially, and therewith lies its capability to cope with loading; when the girth contraction rate is exceeded by the elongation of the tension member, the atoms recede from one another and coherence decreases rapidly.

790.21 Ropes can be pulled around corners. Neither stiff poles nor flexible ropes can be pushed around corners. Tension has a greater distance range of capability than has compression: witness the compression masts and the only-tensionally-suspended long center spans of the great suspension bridges. Tensional capabilities are always more versatile and energetically effective than are compressional capabilities. The variable live loads of suspension bridges are applied directly only to its cables, which distribute the loads evenly. In the same way the tensed tubes of automobile tires receive the shock loads locally and distribute them evenly.

790.22 The taller a column is in proportion to its mid-girth cross-section dimension, the less the load it will bear before it tends to buckle, which means to bend twistingly outward in one direction, andif further loaded ultimately to break into two columns. In principle, tension members of structures have no limit ratio of cross-section-to-length. With materials of higher and higher tensile strength it is possible to make longer and longer and thinner and thinner tension cablesapproaching a condition of very great length and no cross-section at all. (See Figs. 641.01C–D.) With better and better alloys it is possible to make longer and longer, thinner and thinner, clear-span suspension bridges. People tend erroneously to think of those cables as “solid” and of the steel as solidbut they are not solid: the atoms are not touching one another. The distances between the nuclei of the atoms and their orbiting electronsas measured in diameters of their nucleiare approximately the same proportionally as the distance between our star Sun and its planets. The individual atoms are in sufficiently critical proximity to be sustainingly attracted to one another as are the Earth and Moon, which obviously are not touching each other. In aeronautical terms they are all in dynamic “flying formation. ” As the Earth and the Moon co-orbit the Sun, and as the Sun and its planets together are in flight formation in our galactic system’s merry-go- round, and as the billions of galaxies omnirecede from one another, they are all intersecured by comprehensive mass attraction. The mutual interpull force between Sun, Earth, and Moon is manifest rotationally around opposite sides of the Earth by the twice-a-day tides as quadrillions of tons of water are progressively pulled outward from Earth’s surface jointly by the Moon and the Sunand then are allowed to subside. In the Milky Way periphery of our galaxy the stars do not touch one another: they are in critical proximity. The Universe itself is held together by tensioninvisible, substanceless tension that allows for local motions and transformations.

790.23 The same structural laws of Universe operate at both macro- and microlevels: they are the structural laws of our planet Earth.

790.24 Architecture on our planet Earth is the design process of building macrostructures out of microstructures, the building of visible structures out of invisible structures.