Seventy years of tensegrities (and counting)

We try to make a long way short by proceeding per exempla from Kenneth Snelson’s sculptures and Richard Buckminster Fuller’s coinage of the term tensegrity to modern tensegrity metamaterials. We document the passage from initial interest in tensegrity frameworks for their visual impact to today’s interest, driven by their peculiar structural performances. In the past seventy years, the early art pieces and roofing structural complexes have been followed by formalization of the principles governing the form-finding property of ‘pure’ tensegrity structures and by engineering hybridization leading to a host of diverse practical applications, such as variable-geometry civil engineering structures, on-earth and in-orbit deployable structures and robots, and finally to recent and promising studies on tensegrity metamaterials and small-scale tensegrity structures.