TENSEGRITIES. THE
THING IS, BY NATURE,
RESTLESS
Tensegrity is the way
the world organizes
itself.
“Tensegrity” is a kind
of compound word,
coined by Richard
Buckminster Fuller in
1920s, that becomes
autonomous and would
eventually structure
the way of the being of
the world. Tension and
integrity, or rather
integrity for tension.
Tensegrity, in Fuller’s
opinion, is a
construction, an
architectural model
characterized by
elements resistant to
compression which, even
if they don’t touch
themselves, are
interconnected by
different continuous
series of “islands of tension”: so, the structure is “differentiated”, there are elements in tension
and elements in compression, the former are associative and cohesive, the latter dissociative.
Therefore, we have a sort of trespassing of the same concept of “tension”, generally imagined as
accomplished and motionless: for the first time the “tension” seems to be anticipated by a previous
state, the “pre-constraint”. More than half a century later, Donald Ingber, through tensegrity and preconstraint,
explained the function of the cells following the model of tensegrity such as the
architectural form common to the whole living nature. In the sensitive terms of Philosophy (and
Cognitive Sciences) we are in the presence of a real invitation to look to the forms through
“invisible” and “under visible”, that means, in epistemological terms, to re-conceptualize World, Life,
Consciousness, Body and Perception.
The thing is, by nature, restless
