Revised for 2005 by Bob Burkhardt


Upon my completion of my initial reading of Buckminster Fuller's two Synergetics books
(Synergetics, New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc., 1975, and Synergetics 2, New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc., 1979), or perhaps in the middle of that reading, I conceived a great interest in tensegrity structures and the mathematics involved in designing them. Bucky's idea of building a dome big enough to cover an entire city had a certain fascination for me as well.

The best mathematical resource I had found was Hugh Kenner's: Geodesic Math and How to Use it (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976). It had all the details for determining strut lengths for geodesic domes, but only information on simple tensegrity structures. Still it was head and shoulders above anything I had found or was to find at that time. (More recently some civil engineers have come up with a design technique which seems to work very well although I have yet to unravel it. See the >Hanaor92 reference in my tensegrity prospectus.)


So, I began a correspondence with Buckminster Fuller's office to see if I could find out more. I didn't save a copy of the first letter I sent, but the reply below should give you the flavor. The pamphlet they kindly sent in response, TENSEGRITY: Introductory Theory and Model Construction by Robert Grip (Philadelphia: Buckminster Fuller, 1978), pretty much contained what I'd found in Anthony Pugh's an introduction to tensegrity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976) which was interesting for the variety of models it outlined but didn't bother with math at all. The basic design technique for complex structures seemed to be to build it with rubber bands or something very elastic to start with and then use those average tendon lengths to build with less elastic tendons.

In retrospect, I think that was the extent of the design theory available at that point, but I thought there might be more so I decided to press further. This conviction stemmed from reading Bucky's U.S. Patent #3,063,521 (Tensile-Integrity Structures), especially Figure 7 which gave member length data to seven decimal places. I felt this data must have been derived using some mathematical method. From the drift of the next reply I assume I must have sent a couple more letters, an initial letter seeking more information and a follow-up when that wasn't answered.

» Click here to go to Bob Burkhardt's site to read the full letter