Curved surfaces can give plates a unique aesthetic effect and physical advantages in acoustics and optics. Assembling such curved plates can greatly improve the image of buildings and enrich their functions. It is thus not surprising to notice that their wide applications in designed or completed buildings in China have become a trend. Thus, this study offers a comprehensive summary of the application progress of curved plates in the architectural field from three aspects: image expression, acoustic characteristics, and optical characteristics. On this basis, future directions are proposed. The main findings or suggestions are as follows: (1) climate harshness has increased recently, and the safety of structures and materials and the coupling effect of the two must be fully considered when designing the shapes of curved surface buildings; (2) research on the mechanism and numerical calculation of curved diffuser systems with different sizes and curvatures needs to be further developed; and (3) experimental studies of various and complex curved plates and different conditions to explore their optimal reflectivity, transmittance, absorptivity, and other optical properties will be an important development direction.

The retaining structure of a shield tunnel is usually subjected to static loading; however, cyclic loading such as the vibration loading of the train will act on the lining structure year after year that cannot be neglected. Due to the complex manufacturing and assembling process of the lining segment, initial defects in the segment are inevitable. Such defects will propagate under the cyclic loading such as the train vibration, which may cause a large threat to the shield tunnel system. In this paper, a defective shield tunnel lining segment under cyclic loading is studied by both a full‐scale experiment and three‐dimensional numerical simulations to investigate its fracture properties and failure mechanism and make a rational estimate of its fatigue life. Results show that crack propagation of the defective shield tunnel segment can be identified as several different stages based on its deformation characteristics, and the failure pattern of the segment is determined by its initial defects. The results by the experiment and numerical investigation are in good agreement for each other.