Abstract

Tensegrities. The thing is, by nature, restless Tensegrity is the way the world organizes itself. “Tensegrity” is a kind of compound word, coined by Richard Buckminster Fuller in 1920s, that becomes autonomous and would eventually structure the way of the being of the world. Tension and integrity, or rather integrity for tension. Tensegrity, in Fuller’s opinion, is a construction, an architectural model characterized by elements resistant to compression which, even if they don’t touch themselves, are interconnected by different continuous series of “islands of tension”: so, the structure is “differentiated”, there are elements in tension and elements in compression, the former are associative and cohesive, the latter dissociative. Therefore, we have a sort of trespassing of the same concept of “tension”, generally imagined as accomplished and motionless: for the first time the “tension” seems to be anticipated by a previous state, the “pre-constraint”. More than half a century later, Donald Ingber, through tensegrity and pre-constraint, explained the function of the cells following the model of tensegrity such as the architectural form common to the whole living nature. In the sensitive terms of Philosophy (and Cognitive Sciences) we are in the presence of a real invitation to look to the forms through “invisible” and “under visible”, that means, in epistemological terms, to re-conceptualize World, Life, Consciousness, Body and Perception. The thing is, by nature, restless.