grid that will be the approximating minimal surface embedded into non-plane closed curve because of the minimum of the function where parameter . As an example the surface of catenoid which is calculated by the described above approach is presented in Fig 3. The radii of rings and the height of catenoid are equal to 1.0. The numerical area of catenoidal surface determined by SGM is equal to 2,9967189 (exact value is 2.992). Tensile fabric structures form finding For structural analysis, the configuration of the structure is generally known à priori. This is not the case for tensile structures such as tension fabric structures. Since the membrane in a tension structure possesses no flexural stiffness, its form or configuration depends upon initial prestressing and the loads to which it is subjected. Thus, the load-bearing behaviour and the shape of the membrane cannot be separated and cannot be generally described by simple geometric models only. The membrane shape, the loads on the structure and the internal stresses interact in a non-linear manner to satisfy the equilibrium equations. The preliminary design of tension structures involves the determination of an initial configuration referred to as form finding. In addition to satisfying the equilibrium conditions, the initial configuration must accommodate both architectural (aesthetics) and structural (strength and stability) requirements. Further, the requirements of space and clearance should be met, the membrane principal stresses must be tensile to avoid wrinkling, and the radii of the double-curved surface should be small enough to resist out-of-plane loads and to insure structural stability (work ). Several variations on form finding approaches based on FEM have been developed to assist engineers in the design of tension fabric structures. All of them are based on the same assumption as that used for analysing the behaviour of tension structures under various loads. However, as it is noted by some researchers it might sometimes be preferable to use the so-called ‘minimal surfaces’ in the design of tension structures. The physical meaning of SGM consists in convergence of the energy of an arbitrary grid structure embedded into rigid (or elastic) 3D contour to minimum that is equivalent to minimum sum distances between arbitrary pairs of grid nodes. It allows the minimum surface energy problem solution substituting for finding grid structure sum energy minimum finding that provides much more plain final algebraic equation system than the usual FEM formulation. The generalized formulation of SGM