Smooth surfaces from bilinear patches: discrete affine minimal surfaces (Q2637078)

From the introduction: Some architects aim at architectural structures which exhibit smooth freeform skins. However, smooth architectural freeform hulls are a big challenge. Since they have to be composed of panels and the production of the panels needs to be feasible, one has to compose smooth surfaces from simple types of surface patches (panels). Prescribing a simple type of panels, namely bilinear patches, we ask for those surfaces which can be generated by smoothly joining these bilinear patches. Bilinear patches are parts of hyperbolic paraboloids and have been widely used in architecture, where they are called hypar shells. It is clear that smoothly joined negatively curved patches will only generate models of negatively curved surfaces. The shape limitation is even stronger. We show here that smooth surfaces from bilinear patches are discrete affine minimal surfaces with indefinite metric. They agree with the surfaces studied by \textit{M. Craizer} et al. [Differ. Geom. Appl. 28, No. 2, 158--169 (2010; Zbl 1191.39006)], where the authors did not point to the fact that their quad meshes, when filled by patches of hyperbolic paraboloids, do in fact generate smooth surfaces. We present computational design approaches and study special cases which should be interesting for the architectural application.