Anti-gravity mind-bending balancing building block Tensegrity model

Description

My mind is simply blown, what kind of magic is this? No magic – this Anti-gravity mind-bending balancing building block Tensegrity model is pure science!

This Anti-gravity mind-bending balancing building block Tensegrity model includes more than 176 pieces. Each piece of blocks is manufactured by high-quality plastics, toxic-free, and lead safe material with the highest standards. The blocks are big-name compatible and close to the precision you see with Lego blocks.

This Anti-gravity mind-bending balancing building block Tensegrity model is essentially a small tension integrity sculpture. The center of gravity of the upper part of the model makes all chains in tension, thus forming a stable system that seems to overcome gravity. The completed tensegrity model can be used as a decorative conversation piece for home and office.

Note on construction: Instructions are included and are fairly accurate. Once built, we suggest you superglue the bricks together, especially the vertical arms and base.

Tensegrity is a term with a rich and sprawling history. It was coined by Buckminster Fuller, the iconoclastic architect, engineer, and poet, to describe his vision of a new kind of architecture, one that looked like it was built by nature instead of by humans. In contrast to the pyramids, columns, and brick-on-brick buildings of the past, which pile solid elements compressively, one on top of the other, Fuller imagined a world full of unconventional structures that maintain their stability, or integrity, through a pervasive tensional force, hence the term tensegrity.

Fuller began developing his vision in the 1920s, but it was his student, the sculptor Kenneth Snelson, who, in 1949, created the first structure to be defined as a “tensegrity”. Using two X-shaped wooden struts suspended in air by a taut nylon cable, Snelson captured the defining features of tensegrity:

• Pervasive tension and a separation of rigid elements. The compression-resistant struts do not touch but instead are individually lifted, each embraced and interconnected by a system of continuously tensed cables, a condition that Snelson and Fuller called “continuous tension, discontinuous compression.”
• Stable. Though ethereal in appearance—its wooden Xs appear almost to float—Snelson’s sculpture is remarkably stable, despite its minimal use of rigid elements. This stability is due to the fact that tensile and compressive components are, at all times, in mechanical equilibrium.
• Prestressed. This mechanical equilibrium results from the way the compression and tensile components interact to bring out each other’s essential nature: the cables pull in on both ends of the struts, while the struts push out and stretch the cables. The result is that each element in a tensegrity structure is already stressed—the compression elements are already compressed, the tensile elements already tensed—and they are stressed by each other, a condition known as “self-stress” or “prestress.”
• Resilient. While they are stabilized by prestress, tensegrity structures are also responsive to outside perturbation. Their components immediately reorient when the structure is deformed, and they do so reversibly and without breaking.
• Modular. Though complete on its own, a tensegrity structure can combine with other such structures to form a larger tensegrity system. In these systems, individual tensegrity units can be disrupted without compromising overall system integrity.
• Hierarchical. In fact, smaller tensegrity structures may function as compressive or tensile components in a larger tensegrity system, which in turn may perform a similar function in still larger systems

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Image Credits

In-Article Image Credits

Brisbane tensegrity bridge via Wikipedia by Steve Collis

Featured Image Credit

Anti-gravity mind-bending balancing building block Tensegrity model detail via