Floating compression · Snelson, 1948
Tensegrity — Sticks that never touch, standing anyway.
Six rigid struts in three orthogonal pairs, none of them meeting. Twenty-four cables do all the holding — pure tension, no joints, no glue. Kenneth Snelson bent the first one from wire in 1948; Buckminster Fuller gave the trick its name: tensional integrity. Drag to circle it. Pluck it, and the whole net argues back.
How to read it. Every cable is tinted by its strain — crimson at ease, amber under load. The breathing is each cable family's rest length slowly re-tuning; the struts drift, the net re-balances, and the clearance between sticks never reaches zero.
Tension readoutsettling
—%
Mean cable strain
—%
Strut clearance
tautest cable—
24 cables live