Some structures under the action of some specific loads can be treated as consisting of rigid and deformable parts. The paper presents a way to include rigid elements into a finite element model accounting for geometrical and material nonlinearities. Lagrange multipliers technique is used to derive equations of motion for the coupled deformable-rigid system. Solution algorithm based on the elimination of the Lagrangian multipliers and dependent kinematic unknowns at the element level is described. A follow-up paper(Rojek and Kleiber 1993) complements the discussion by giving details of the computer implementation and presenting some realistic test examples.