islands of compression, le mot juste jeudi 23.03.24

[follypersist]

_{(photo by cassandra rose)}

of those phrases that reflect the natural world around us to help us make sense of it all, one you may hear me say any day of the week is this:

"islands of compression in a sea of tension."

It's an old Buckminster Fuller saw, and without going down the rabbit hole into tensegrity (tensile integrity) structures or cuboctahedrons, I think it's a memorable, evocative, effective maxim. As children we make towers out of only compression pieces, bricks on bricks, and maybe sometimes we think everything in the world works like that.

But it's not the only way the world works, especially when we take biology and not just geometry as our compass. The way you can walk and stand and move about is the marvelous product of a network working in concert and opposition. Your bones, rigid and strong, exist as islands of compression, anchor and counterweight to that web, the never-ending network of tension that are your ligaments and muscles. By compression or tension alone we would collapse into an un-moving or too-moveable heap; and from this we learn to construct other things that can stand tall and move.

And like that's neat, right? Once you start thinking with this rubric you see it elsewhere, everywhere; not just in the annals of esoteric constructivist theoretical polyhedra. It's so easy to think about hard, inflexible things as the only thing that's real, as the thing that provides support and structure, but it's not the way. How do you build bridges light as the air around them? How do you make buildings that scrape the sky? They stand tall and move, flexibly held by tension counterbalancing the compression that we think we see. How would you make a mech move? You make it look like us.