EC TOWER
PRATT INSTITUTE
This work is a prime example of one of Snelson’s tensegrity structures, a word created by the philosopher Buckminster Fuller to describe Snelson’s structural innovation by combining the words “tension” and “integrity.” That combination manifests itself here in webs of stainless steel tubes and cables that are held in highly stressed, structural arrangements through the push-pull balance of compressive forces in the tubes and tension forces in the cables. If Max Bill, the artist and Bauhaus teacher, was right when he claimed that art can greatly evolve from the basis of mathematical thought, then one could assert that the theory and practice by which Snelson has developed his art is the ideal amalgam of science and art, of breathtaking engineering and visionary structural and design purity.