Grace Glueck of the New York Times gives Bucky Fuller full credit for tensegrity:

Although Fuller had no academic credentials, his ideas found expression in engineering, architecture and what he called "energetic-synergetic geometry," or geometry as found in nature.

From his study of it, he devised a structural system that Noguchi adapted for his own use, "tensegrity," as Fuller later called it. In this system taut, light tension units, rather than heavy-compression ones, carry primary loads and give the whole its structural integrity. The principle is illustrated by a bicycle wheel whose rim and hub are held in place by the tensile spokes. At the same time, the sculptor Kenneth Snelson, then a student of Fuller's at Black Mountain College, was working on a similar idea.