Debunking “Tensegrity” - A Personal Perspective

SOME PERSONAL NOTES I started work on “tensegrity” in the early 1980s. At that time it was an obscure topic with only few investigators showing any interest, which is one reason I was interested ‐ The few that come to mind are Emmerich, Motro, Vilnay, and of course Snelson at the artistic level. There may be two or three more that I can’t think of now or that I did not know about, but that’s about it. It was some time after the initial interest sparked by Fuller and picked up by his followers at Berkeley ‐ Pugh and Kenner. This lull lasted for over ten years, during which all my efforts at rousing interest (and raising funds) met with indifference by potential funding agencies (NASA, NSF, US Air-force). By the mid-1990s my research led me to the conclusion that this structural concept is inherently inefficient (in terms of supported load to self-weight ratio), particularly under flexure (More on this below). I have to state here, that not only did this negative result not disappoint me, but I consider it the most significant of my (modest) achievements in the field. Falling in love with one’s own ideas and lack of self-criticism is a common human frailty, particularly among researchers. Demonstrating a well-founded negative result is therefore often more valuable than confirming one’s expectations or wishes. Unfortunately the field of “tensegrity” is rife with false and unsubstantiated claims, such as light weight, ability to support very large spans (e.g. Emmerich ‐ cover whole cities, and others. By contrast, Snelson, when I met him in his Lower Manhattan studio, was skeptical about potential applications). Ironically, after some twenty years of activity, and just as I considered my interest in the topic as exhausted, the field has taken off to the extent of becoming almost a fad among researchers from a wide range of expertise and disciplines (engineers, architects, space engineers and scientists, biologists,