Abstract
This paper proposes that large elastic deformations found in curved splines can be successfully formulated and employed in the form-finding or analysis of structural surfaces. We discuss our finite-difference element formulation that models in-plane bent splines in explicit numerical
methods such as Dynamic Relaxation. We validate the presented algorithm for the elastica and present its applications for small-scale natural systems (like human hairs) and larger civil structures (like spline stressed membranes and grid shells).