In structural engineering, the application of the finite element (FE) method to model a spatially-distributed system exploits physical insight into the plant dynamics and often results in a lumped model of large order, which is undesirable or even impossible for model-based controller design. This paper bridges the gap between FE modelling and distributed identification by proposing a novel identification technique to extract a distributed model from an FE model for both parameter-invariant and parameter-varying systems. The obtained models define the system dynamics on subsystems and capture the interacted behaviour among neighbouring sub-systems. The proposed approach is tested on an experimental beam structure equipped with an array of piezo actuators and sensors, and the model accuracy is compared to that of black-box identification.