Something fun! Last summer saw us construct a tensegrity for my own wedding. A tensegrity is a structural principle in which a network of rigid struts are held together by a system of tensile components.

In a tensegrity structure, the rigid elements experience compression (they push against each other), while the tensioned elements experience tension (they pull on the rigid elements). This creates a stable system that can support loads and maintain its shape even though the elements are not directly connected.

 In our case we used beech struts held together with 2mm steel cables. We started by modelling the geometry in a 3D environment  to understand the perfect lengths between connecting nodes. We then constructed a temporary framework to suspend the struts in their position-this allowed us to tie the elements together. To ensure the right amount of tension is placed into the structure we constructed a jig to ensure each cable was cut to the correct length and then included tell tails which once the cables were looped through their c we could manually pull the wires until they met the tell tails. Each cable was sequentially tightened until we had confidence for de-propping!