Tensegrity Talkback

Craft & Design Education
Tensegrity Talkback

For the Museum of Mathematics
MathMonday

The column on do-it-yourself tensegrity generated a couple of interesting responses.  First, “bonooboong” shared a design for a building that uses tensegrity as a sculptural element:

tensegrityBuilding

And second, Robert Coolman refined the classic six-strut tensegrity structure, using elastic hair bands for the tension elements to provide uniformity and color, and groups of four narrow dowels (skewers?) for the struts:

tensegrityIcosa

Note the clever arrangement of colors which results in all four colors meeting at every vertex, and in all four colors comprising every non-planar quadrilateral.  Also, each possible set of three colors occurs on exactly two opposite faces of the icosahedron.  mondays@momath.org is still accepting other mathematically meaningful tensegrity topics…

2 thoughts on “Tensegrity Talkback

  1. Peter Le Roux says:

    Here are some instructions that I tested on a Scout function a few weeks back, so these are fairly easily built. The next step would be to scale this up to 12 foot spars… http://ropesandpoles.blogspot.com/2013/07/bunny-park-tensegrity-cube.html

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Executive Director, Museum of Mathematics

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