Animals
Read here about tensegrity concepts as they relate to animals, the animal kingdom, and the depiction of animals.
Overview[edit]
The study of tensegrity in animals is usually an application of Myers, Tom|Myers Anatomy Trains approach to comprehending the interplay of fascia and bone|bone in vertebrates.
Horse[edit]
Snelson's Use of Horse Names in Tensegrity Sculpture[edit]
Snelson, Kenneth|Snelson reports that his sculpture titles come from unorthodox sources: "A number of them are named after discontinued race horse names that he found in a handbook put out by the Jockey Club." These include Free Ride Home, Triple Crown and Easy Landing. [1]
Horse Injuries and Tensegrity[edit]
Rachel Heart, DVM, gives presentations called "Clinical Applications of Tensegrity: Beyond the Motor Unit". In the talk she analyzes activity induced injuries in horses. Heart argues that fascial-web tensegrity principles can be applied to increase the ability to absorb and distribute force, and avoid injury. Click here for Heart's website, http://heartequine.com/%7Cheartequine.com
Rabbit[edit]
Tomohiro Tachi proposed a novel method for designing tensegrity structures. To illustrate its effectiveness at specifying freeform structures, he illustrated the paper with a tensegrity outlining the form of a rabbit.
From the abstract: In this paper, we propose a novel interactive method for flexibly designing tensegrity structures under valid force equilibriums. Unlike previous form-finding techniques that aim to obtain a unique solution by fixing some parameters such as the lengths of elements and force densities, our method provides a design system that allows a user to continuously interact with the form within a multidimensional solution space. First, a valid initial form is generated by converting a given polygon mesh surface into a strut-and-cable network that approximates the mesh, and the form is then perturbed to attain an equilibrium state through a two-step optimization of both node coordinates and force densities. Then, the form can be freely transformed by using a standard 2D input device while the system updates the form on the fly based on the orthogonal projection of a deformation mode into the solution space. The system provides a flexible platform for designing a tensegrity form for use as a static architectural structure or a kinetic deployable system.
A video of Tachi using his freeform method:
Link: http://www.tsg.ne.jp/TT/cg/
Animal Enclosures[edit]
Poultry Shed[edit]
Nikhil Vyas produced a model of a poultry shed or chicken coop: see Poultry Shed By Vyas for more details.
Aviary[edit]
Alexy, Christian|Christian Alexy produced tensegrity based enclosures for animals, such as an aviary, pictured below.
References and Links[edit]
1 Kenneth Snelson, Forces Made Visible, Hard Press Editions, Lenox, MA, p. 25
Category:Portal To Art & Design | biotensegrity