7.2.1 In January 1998, Donald E. Ingber [2] publishes an article in the Scientific American in which he makes an extraordinary claim that he has recognised a universal set of building principles that guide the design of organic structures, from simple carbon compounds to complex cells and tissues. This article proved to be a major inspiration for my thesis and reaffirmed my belief that the architectural principles which Fuller was a proponent of could be of significant importance when considering building information architectures. In his article Ingber states that "identifying and describing the molecular puzzle pieces will do little if we do not understand the rules of their assembly."( 1998, pg. 30) For two decades he discovered and explored the fundamental aspects of self-assembly. For example, in the human body large molecules self-assemble into cellular components known as organelles, which self-assemble into cells, which self-assemble into tissues. Ingber discovered that an astoundingly wide variety of natural systems including carbon atoms, water molecules, proteins, viruses, cells, tissues, humans and other living creatures are constructed by a common form of architecture known as Tensegrity.

7.2.2 Tensegrity takes us back to chapter 1, to 1948 and Black Mountain College, where Buckminster Fuller taught and worked with Kenneth Snelson, now an internationally renowned sculptor, then a young student who came under his spell along with John Cage and many others. Deeply inspired by Fuller, Snelson came up with a prototype employing discontinuous compression which Fuller later coined Tensegrity. Tensegrity (Tensional Integrity) was at the heart of Fuller's Universe. After some time passed, Fuller ceased to credit Snelson for the prototype, causing a deep rift between the two for decades. In a letter to R. Motro of the international Journal of Space Studies, Snelson says he has been "deeply troubled that most people who have heard of 'Tensegrity' have been led to believe that the structure was a Bucky Fuller invention, which it is not . . . Whenever an inventor defends his authorship the issues invariably turns out to be important only to the author himself, to others it is trivia." (Snelson, 1990, www.teleport.com/~pdx4d/docs/rmoto.html)

7.2.3 But as we can see from recent scientific discoveries, these are nature's principles, not inventions by men, regardless of the method used to arrive at a recognition of their existence. The ongoing battle of egos between Fuller and Snelson ultimately becomes more interesting from a perspective of the meaning of authorship and ownership than in establishing who gets the credit. The two men had a continuos debate over the ownership of Tensegrity principles that peeked in 1980 when Fuller wrote Snelson a twenty-eight page letter in which he clarifies his point of view on this issue. The letter was in response to Snelson's one-page letter in which he once again claims to be the inventor of Tensegrity and takes issue with Fuller for having his students imitate his sculpture. Snelson demands: "I would ask you please to explain to me at last-directly, not through an aide-why you have been purposely dishonest in this entire matter. And, why, now that I have so established myself as a world-renown artist with these structures, that you take it as your prerogative to plagiarise further, through the imitative skills of these young students. Do your ends justify these means?" He included a letter by Bucky written thirty years before in which he tells Snelson that if he had demonstrated the structure to an art audience it would have not rung a bell like it did in him, who had been seeking this structure in Energetic Geometry. Indeed in this letter from 1949, Fuller clearly acknowledges Snelson for his prototype: "The name Ken Snelson will come to be known as a true pioneer of the realised good life and good will." In his lengthy response in 1980, it is clear that Fuller wanted to set the record straight and that both men had a lot of mutual resentment towards one another. The lifelong contradiction that marked Fuller's persona emerges again. Although he states rightly that "inventors cannot invent nor obtain patterns on eternal principles-cosmic laws of the Universe," he does exactly that. In 1962 he patents Tensegrity. [3]

7.2.5 The disagreement between Fuller and Snelson not only brings to the forefront issues of authorship but of potential problems in collaborative work and in the difference between artists who may arrive to a discovery through pure intuition versus a more scientific method. Clearly Snelson was inspired and would not have arrived at the prototype of Tensegrity without Fuller. But there is no guarantee that Fuller would have arrived at this structure on his own either, even with all his experience and expertise. For although he had an entire background of searching for these principles, it is ironic that a young student ends up tapping into the Universal system and materialising it. Neither man owns this principle, as Bucky himself says, but the credit does go to Snelson for being the one who brought this principle into existence. Fuller however, had a vision for Tensegrity that went much further than that of building physical structures. He recognised the universality of this principle in the solar system and planetary systems, in macro and micro-cosmic structuring of invisible tensional gravity, and in atomic structures. Even as a child he was absolutely convinced that triangulation was absolutely necessary for structural stability.

7.2.6 Be as it may, Fuller seems to have been right in his estimation that the principles of Tensegrity operate universally. Donald Ingber writes: " . . . in the complex Tensegrity structure inside every one of us, bones are the compression struts, and muscles, tendons, and ligaments are the tension-bearing members. At the other end of the scale, proteins and other key molecules in the body also stabilise themselves through the principles of Tensegrity." (1998, pg. 32) Using a simple Tensegrity model of a cell built with dowels and elastic cords, he shows how Tensegrity structures mimic the known behaviour of living cells. A tensegrity structure, like that of a living cell, flattens itself and its nucleus when it attaches itself to a rigid surface and retracts into a more spherical shape on a flexible substrate. Understanding the mechanics of cellular structures could lead to new approaches to cancer therapy and tissue repair and perhaps even to the creation of artificial tissue replacements. (Ingber,1998, pp. 30-39.)

7.2.7 Ingber talks about Fuller in his article and about the molecule that was named after him, and indeed has been well acquainted with the work of Snelson as well as Fuller. In 1983, he writes a letter to Fuller in which he states, The beauty of life is once again that of geometry with spatial constraints as the only unifying principle. It is of interest to note that, as presented in the accompanying paper, cancer may be then viewed as the opposite of life resulting from a breakdown of this geometric hierarchy of synergetic arrangements. (Edmunson, 1987, pg. 257.) [top]