What does the term tensegrity mean?
One way of understanding tensegrity is that it’s a pattern that results when the pushes and pulls within a structure have a win-win relationship with each other. The pull is balanced by the push, producing integrity of tension and compression. Snelson’s idea was for a structure made of bars or struts suspended by cables—the cables are under tension and the struts are under compression. The tension in the system is the “tense” part, and the whole thing was stable—it didn’t fall down—so that’s the “integrity” part, hence the term tensional integrity. How do mathematicians understand tensegrities? It depends on the mathematician you ask. The way I think of it is quite simple: you have a bunch of points connected by lines, some of the points are allowed to get closer together but not further apart—these are what we call the “cables”—but other pairs of points are allowed to get further apart but not closer together—those are the “struts.” These rules put constraints on the system that deter
