Tribute to Kenneth Snelson

This paper presents the project of a tensegrity pavilion dedicated to the memory of Kenneth Snelson (1927-2016), the American artist who invented tensegrities and popularized them with the sculptures he built worldwide. The shape of the pavilion, based on a combination of X-Modules, is that of a “gate”, so that when walking through it, one can observe on the sides and above the transparent “floating-compression” arrangement of struts and cables. The choice of materials employed in the construction — bars in fir-wood for struts and recycled sailing ropes for cables - is also inspired by the Snelson’s tensegrity primary plywood “X-Piece”, complying with a fabrication and assembly procedure conceived to maximize simplicity and recyclability. The form finding of the pavilion was carried out by energy minimization on a virtual elastic structure, while for the structural design, a linearized static and dynamic analysis was performed considering own weight load and live loads. The geometry developed for the nodal connections between struts and cables has been realized by the Italian company Progetto Legno, according to a customized fabrication process.