This paper examines the norm-relaxed method of feasible directions applied to solving structural optimization problems. The novelty of the method lies in elliptical bounding of the length of the direction computed by a subproblem characteristic of a popular algorithm of Pironneau and Polak. It is shown that updating the scaling matrix generating the elliptical norm results in computational savings over the original method of Pironneau and Polak. The new method is evaluated on several classical structural optimization problems and benchmarked against other feasible directions codes, i.e. CONMIN and DOT.