When conceiving of Free Ride Home, Kenneth Snelson first created a small maquette of metal tubes and knotted strings, envisioning what it would be like to walk under and through its silvery linear forms. “I began by thinking of a sculpture that would soar overhead,” he noted. “I started with a central core and then developed it in three directions with three arches. One of the arches began to take on a descending fast plunge. It reminded me of the shape of a bucking horse. So, Free Ride Home, the name of a racehorse, became the name of the sculpture.”

Touching the ground at just three points, the creatively engineered sculpture is fashioned from a network of stainless steel cables knotted to aluminum tubes. Installing the work at Storm King in the spring of 1975, a crew of just four raised the entire structure in under an hour. Free Ride Home embodies Snelson’s playful use of organic forms constrained by an internal structural tension, a push–pull system he invented in 1948. Within this system, reminiscent of the human anatomy, cables function like muscles and the aluminum tubes like bones. Snelson was a student of the architect and futurist Buckminster Fuller at Black Mountain College in North Carolina in 1948. 

Witnessing Fuller harness the forces of tension and compression to construct his early geodesic domes, Snelson was inspired to explore these concepts through his own experimental sculptures. In the 1960s Fuller shortened the phrase “tensional integrity” into the portmanteau “tensegrity” to refer to structures that incorporate both continuous tension and discontinuous compression. Snelson’s Free Ride Home is a prime example of this principle.