Digital Biomimetics: Tensegrity Tower

Some carnivore plants, like the Venus Flytrap, as soon as they sense a fly posing over their leaves, are able to snap and close themselves before flies can take off. This sudden and fast reaction is called nastic movement. Other plants, like the sunflower, are able to rotate their stem in order to constantly face the sun with their flower, tracing its path during the day while returning in the original position during the night. The ability of a plant to regulate its growth or rotation according to an external influence is called tropism: the tropism is positive if the response follows the stimulus, negative if the response negates the stimulus. Sunflowers are performing a positive phototropism (they follow the sun). How do plants perform tropisms and nastic movements? How can a plant be elastic enough to resist the forces of wind by bending progressively in reason of the applied force? All structures of biological systems in nature are not passive structure, but they are balanced pretensioned structure. Forces of tension are equated by compression in a spatial structural integrity. This particular condition of balance was named tensegrity by Buckminster Fuller, who coined this portmanteau to describe the work of sculptor Kenneth Snelson. Our bones and tendons-muscles together form a tensegrity structure. The idea of the studio is to evolve the application of tensegrity on a tower project, hybridizing it with cell logic and ultimately produce a prototype that will serve also as proof of concept. The project was carried on as a collective project.