When I was a kid on a school trip to Washington D.C., I was perplexed by Kenneth Snelson’s Needle Tower. I later learned that his sculpture, occupying a space in at the junction of art and engineering, was a type of structure called a tensegrity — a word coined by Buckminster Fuller, best known for popularizing the geodesic dome. After playing around with models using straws, rubber bands, and chopsticks, I decided to build my own large-scale icosahedron tensegrity. I used cedar for the compressive members, and rope for the tensile members, carefully tensioning each loop of rope to keep the entire structure symmetric.