Shortest Walk

PAACADEMY provides online courses on the Shortest Walk Grasshopper plugin, teaching architects how to generate biomimetic structural networks and complex circulation paths across organic surfaces.

Shortest Walk is a Grasshopper plugin for finding shortest path networks across mesh geometry. Given a mesh and a set of start and end points, Shortest Walk calculates the shortest traversal paths across the mesh surface, producing curve networks that follow the topology and curvature of the underlying geometry. In architectural design, this capability is heavily used for generating circulation paths across complex terrain or mapping structural networks.

At PAACADEMY, Shortest Walk is explored conceptually in Computational Thinking by Ignacio Revenga, connecting math to natural systems:

• Biomimetic Generation: Replicating the efficiency of leaf venation, mycelium, and vascular networks on architectural surfaces.
• Circulation Logic: Automatically finding the most efficient pedestrian pathways across undulating, multi-level landscape meshes.
• Structural Tracery: Generating rib-like structural systems on doubly-curved surfaces by tracing the shortest routes between anchor points.