A spherical sculpture graces the traffic circle at the entrance to the town of Wiesloch in Baden-Wuerttemberg. The artwork is an installation by the internationally renowned artist Markus Heinsdorff. schlaich bergermann partner was responsible for the structural analysis and erection analysis for this engineered work of art.
The installation with a diameter of 4.6 meters consists of a total of 30 bars and 30 cables, where no bar touches another. These bars are supported solely by 10-millimeter-thick steel cables. For this purpose, at each end of the bars there are rotating cable attachments, which were specifically designed for this structure. The artwork is based on the technical principle of “tensegrity”, developed by US architect Buckminster Fuller (1895-1983). It refers to a stable bar structure in which the bars do not touch each other and are connected only by tension elements. For this modern interpretation in Wiesloch, all dimensions and cable elongations were calculated in advance to be able to produce the form with a total of 120 nodes.
