Light as a veil the tent roof of the Munich Olympic stadium seems to rest on the columns of the Munich Olympic stadium. Its construction proves that stable building is possible even with low material expense. It is the optimal stress distribution that really matters: compression-resistent and tension-stable building elements have to be arranged and connected in a way that pressure and tension can balance within the system. Thereby the whole object is able to stabilise itself. The english made-up expression for this principle is „tensegrity“, a combination of tension and integrity. The world smallest artificial tensegrity structures are Tim Liedl´s topic of research. Since 2009 Liedl is professor for physics at the Ludwig-Maximilans-Universität München and member of the cluster of excellence "Nanosystems Initiative Munich" (NIM). During a research period at the Harvard Medical School, Boston, Tim Liedl and his local colleagues were able to rebuild a tensegrity model on the nanometer scale for the first time.

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