  We develop a new optimisation technique that combines multiresolution
subdivision surfaces for boundary description with immersed finite elements for
the discretisation of the primal and adjoint problems of optimisation. Similar
to wavelets multiresolution surfaces represent the domain boundary using a
coarse control mesh and a sequence of detail vectors. Based on the
multiresolution decomposition efficient and fast algorithms are available for
reconstructing control meshes of varying fineness. During shape optimisation
the vertex coordinates of control meshes are updated using the computed shape
gradient information. By virtue of the multiresolution editing semantics,
updating the coarse control mesh vertex coordinates leads to large-scale
geometry changes and, conversely, updating the fine control mesh coordinates
leads to small-scale geometry changes. In our computations we start by
optimising the coarsest control mesh and refine it each time the cost function
reaches a minimum. This approach effectively prevents the appearance of
non-physical boundary geometry oscillations and control mesh pathologies, like
inverted elements. Independent of the fineness of the control mesh used for
optimisation, on the immersed finite element grid the domain boundary is always
represented with a relatively fine control mesh of fixed resolution. With the
immersed finite element method there is no need to maintain an analysis
suitable domain mesh. In some of the presented two- and three-dimensional
elasticity examples the topology derivative is used for creating new holes
inside the domain.
