Work by Maarten Kuijvenhoven and Matthijs Toussaint

I received an interesting email from Maarten Kuijvenhoven, structural engineer at DHV in The Netherlands. He studied bending geometry in his thesis work at TU Delft (February 2009) 
http://homepage.tudelft.nl/p3r3s/MSc_projects/reportKuijvenhoven.pdf
http://homepage.tudelft.nl/p3r3s/IASSpaperKuivenhovenHoogenboom.pdf (reworked into a paper)

"About three years ago I wrote my thesis at TU Delft about timber grid shells and also tried to answer what geometry an elastically bent beam will have. The problem was that standard engineering formulas for deformation of beams exist, but are only valid as long as deformations remain small. Therefore I had to work it out in a more elaborate way using the concept of minimal potential energy."

Image: Maarten Kuijvenhoven

One of Maartens colleagues, Matthijs Toussaint, wrote his thesis on Timber grid shells as well (May 2007):
http://homepage.tudelft.nl/p3r3s/MSc_projects/reportToussaint.pdf
including some very nice tests with physical models:

Image: Matthijs Toussaint