Geometric design and application of modern shell structures

Weather conditions, climate changes and natural disasters have an important role in humankind's inventions and developments on structure systems as the need for shelter have triggered it. With the inspiration that has been received from nature, humans have designed, developed and improved these structure systems. For structure systems, improvement always means to cover up the wide spans in both economic and light-weighted way. Structure is an organization of parts that form a unity together. In a structure system, these parts are the components. Tessellation and form finding methods allow us to reduce the quantity of the materials and variants of components used as these methods are used in order to organize the components that form the structure geometrically. In this research, the way to create geometric networks with tessellation methods and the methods of application of these geometric networks into the structure systems, such as shell structures, are analyzed. Afterwards, form finding methods' origin and the development processes are discussed. Then, the curved surfaces that can be used in shell structures and the methods of both design and application of the grid shells are also analyzed and addressed. Examinations are made through international case studies that used tessellation and form finding methods. In the conclusion part, general evaluation and comparison of the examples used are made and suggestions are presented for the future researches.