I've had fun building several tensegrity sculptures and I agree that it makes me very wary about bridges built on the idea. They have very unintuitive properties that are difficult to appreciate by just looking at them. They appear to be rigid but are actually springy and without pretensioning they are a floppy mess. It seems to be very non linear too with the structure lacking any rigidity as you tension and then snapping into place at the very end.

There are some very interesting similarities between tensegrities and bio mechanical structures. I used to think of bones as the scaffolding that holds up my meat parts but it's more like the meat parts and the bones work together as a tensegrity structure.