News

Our paper, “Weingarten surfaces, the Codazzi equations and the membrane theory for the formfinding of tension structures, shells and vaults”, written together with  Chris Williams , has just been published in the International Journal of Space Structures in December 2025. It is freely available here:  https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/09560599251388389?utm_source=researchgate.net&utm_medium=article It is well known that the Codazzi equations enable us to obtain a spaci

Our paper “The Airy Stress Function Vector in 3 Dimensions Applied to Frames and Shells and its Relationship with the Beltrami–Günther Tensors” has just been published in the IASS Journal, Special Issue on Architectural Geometry, together with  Chris Williams . You can read it for free here: https://www.ingentaconnect.com/contentone/iass/jiass/2025/00000066/00000002/art00008

Within the course Digital Tools – Parametric Design , this yearly short workshop gives students the opportunity to design and fabricate their own lighting objects using Grasshopper3D and digital fabrication techniques. By working through the complete workflow, from computational model to physical prototype, the workshop emphasises how algorithmic design thinking can be directly translated into material and fabrication constraints, and how design decisions at the geometric lev

In May 2025, more than a year after my PhD defence, I took part in the official doctoral degree conferment ceremony at the Gothenburg Concert Hall, completed in 1935 and designed by Nils Einar Eriksson. The ceremony formally marks admission to the community of doctors and is rich in academic tradition. Receiving the doctoral hat and ring, symbols of academic freedom and commitment to scholarship, was a meaningful moment of reflection after several years of research and teachi

In the ending workshop of the course Digital Tools - Parametric Design we built constructed a cardboard grid shell constructed from an isogonal moulding surface. The course is part of the program Architecture and Engineering at Chalmers University of Technology. The workshop took place at Chalmers University of Technology in December 2024.   Design team: Emil Adiels, Benjamin Björksell, Oskar Nesset Mattsson, Erik Wigh and Chris Williams Participants: Architecture and engin

I am pleased to share that I have been awarded a postdoctoral research grant from Lars Erik Lundbergs Stipendiestiftelse. The grant will support a research project connected to my ongoing work on the design and analysis of hydrostatic masonry shells for new masonry bridges. The project will be carried out at ETH Zurich within the Block Research Group, whose research on structural form-finding and masonry construction provides an ideal environment for further developing this w

At the yearly IASS Annual Symposia at ETH Zürich in August, I presented one of our conference papers The structural behaviour of masonry bridges designed as hydrostatic shells . I was also a co-author of the paper The geometry of the flow of forces and moments across a shell written with Chris Williams. Both conference papers are available in the Proceedings of IASS Annual Symposia : https://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/iass/piass/2024/00002024/00000012/art00021#...

Within the course Digital Tools – Parametric Design , this yearly short workshop gives students the opportunity to design and fabricate their own lighting objects using Grasshopper3D and digital fabrication techniques. By working through the complete workflow, from computational model to physical prototype, the workshop emphasises how algorithmic design thinking can be directly translated into material and fabrication constraints, and how design decisions at the geometric lev

We got our paper The architectural application of shells whose boundaries subtend a constant solid angle accepted in the journal Computer Aided Geometric Design. The paper is freely available here: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0167839624000657 Our recent work shows that it is possible to generate a consistent principal curvature net  for a structural grid – that is, a grid composed of planar panels meeting at right angles – by using a special class of s

We got our paper The geometry of the equilibrium of forces and moments in shells accepted in the journal Meccanica. The paper is freely available here: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11012-024-01773-7 Cite this article: Adiels, E., Williams, C.J.K. The geometry of the equilibrium of forces and moments in shells. Meccanica 60 , 499–523 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11012-024-01773-7 Abstract: We demonstrate that the internal forces and moments in a shell str

I am happy to have been invited by  ATAH Chalmers  and Chalmers Lectures to give a talk tonight together with Francis Aish.

This workshop was part of the Digital Tools—Parametric Design course at Chalmers University of Technology in 2023. The participants were students in the Architecture and Engineering program. The goal was to explore how one can use a cable net and fabric as formwork for curved shells. The theme of the workshop was based on the research performed at ETH "Design process for prototype concrete shells using a hybrid cable-net and fabric formwork" by Veenendaal and Block https://b

I am glad to have been invited to give a lecture about my research for the Center of Experimental Structures at  Pratt Institute  next week. It feels like a very creative and exciting environment! Thanks,  Sergey Pigach  and  David Burke  at The Morphology Studios, for the invitation!

Happy to be invited by professor Günther H. Filz to give a lecture at Universität Innsbruck about my research and teaching at Chalmers University of Technology.

I was invited by Professor Allan McRobie to give a lecture in his course Part IIA: Project GD2 Structural modelling at Cambridge University. Allan wanted me to talk about architectural geometry and some of the workshops I have been part of organising at Chalmers University of Technology. Lecture is available online below:

The 2017 yearly IASS symposium was held in Hamburg, where I presented our paper Brick Patterns on Shells Using Geodesic Coordinates , co-authored with Mats Ander and Chris Williams, as a Pecha Kucha to the full conference. The paper introduces a geometric framework for understanding brick patterns through their bed joints and presents two approaches for constructing geodesic coordinates on a shell: either mapped onto a predefined surface, or used as a form-finding method that