In this paper rectangular and triangular strain based shell finite elements are applied to the analysis of doubly curved dams. The elements having only the five essential external degrees of freedom per corner node, satisfy the exact representation of rigid body modes and are based on shallow shell formulation.NOTATIONA Column vector containing the coefficients of the shape functionsa Half length of the finite element in the x directiona i Coefficients of the shape functionsb Half length of the finite element in the y directionC Transformation matrixh Depth from the top of the dam to the centroid of the element consideredN Vector containing the coordinate variablesP e Vector containing the elemental nodal loadsq Hydrostatic pressurer x Radius of curvature in the x directionr y Radius of curvature in the y directionr x y Twist radius of curvatureu, v, w Displacements in the x, y and z directionsx, y Curvilinear coordinatesδ e Vector containing the elemental nodal displacementsγ Water density