Tensegrity

Index Entry

Tensegrity: Clothesline:

"Here we are looking down from the air onto a house

and there is a tree by the house and here is the clothes-

line. And in order to keep the clothes line off the ground,

you put a couple of struts against the clothes line sag.

So you put a strut this way and one that way. That is the

natural shape it takes. That is what you expect it to

take. It can't take anything else, but the tensegrity

structure here is a red strut, and you think it ought to

push the line the way this one does. Not at all; it

pulls on the line and the one coming the other way pulls

on the line so in a tensegrity structure tension members

yield to the compression members. The compression

members were trying to fly apart like bricks, they are

pulling the tension members and not pushing them. This is

one of the most interesting characteristics of a tensegrity

structure."

(RBF Comment on SLIDE 4:1-3)

TENSEGRITY - (EXTRACT) SEL 712.01 (Gray)-63

Citations

C17967