A form finding issue in parametric modeling

This paper focuses on the development of form finding as a part of a parametric designing toolkit, which aims to make the designing process much more efficient. A special interest is placed on the form finding methods, which have been developed since 1960. In the current paper are several existing approaches compared and evaluated. Well-known methods such as the force density method, dynamic relaxation, thrust network analysis and more resent ones, like genetic algorithm approach are presented and compared on the simple 2D example and 3D shell. Both the mathematical structures as well as the physical basis of the suggested methods are shown. Finally, it is shown how each method approaches the initial equilibrium problem for different boundary conditions and how those methods can be adopted in parametric modelling framework.