Tensegrity light sculptures

Katrine, Tobias and I decided to do a project for CO2PENHAGEN festival 2009 - which was the first CO2 neutral festival in the world. The festival was a very ambitious, and in the end successful event, where all the energy consumed was produced on site using energy sources with no positive emision of CO2. Our idea was to create some landmarks on the festival site, to help create a visual identity for the festival. Designing sculptures for a CO2 neutral festival has obligations; to make a sustainable project, we decided to make structures that could be reused again and again. As a gimmicky event we also wanted to be able to transport the structures by bus. This limited the size of the structural elements, and became an important design parameter. After a long process of investigating different structural concepts for the purpose, we fell in love with the concept of tensegrity - a structural concept which only consist of members in either compression or tension. The principle was first described by Buckminster Fuller and has been used mainly in sculptural projects, especially by Kenneth Snelson who was a student of Buckminster Fuller.
In our working process we also investigated different materials suitable for the concept - we ended up using glassfiber from the dansih producer Fiberline - the glassfiber pipes used are extremely light and we were able to use a profile with a material thickness of only 2 mm - this allows the integrated LED lights to shine through and create an image of floating light tubes in the dark.