In the opinion of this forum, is Grasshopper well suited to extrude circles into cylinders connecting a given set of vertices, in order to create a triangular lattice of the kind shown in the sculpture shown in the link below?
You will note that the exterior surface is a triangle lattice, with rivets at each vertex.
If we begin with a set of 3D points marking the location for each rivet in the sculpture (from laser scan data), the triangulation shown is implied by connecting vertices with thin cylinders and a cap for the rivet itself; the result would approximate the steel lattice shown in the above link.
Would a kind soul suggest a path to do that in Grasshopper, or weigh in on whether this is easy and possible?
The above is Marco Cochrane’s ‘Truth is Beauty’ in the Smithsonian Renwick Gallery’s ‘No Spectators’ show, pictured at the above link.
I think the best way would be creating a “nice”, triangular mesh. There are a lot of built in components and plugins (see food4rhino.com) that allow you for that or you could do that prior to working in gh.
After that you could use “decompose mesh” and " “mesh edges” to get vertices and lines. From these you could do pipes and connectors of some sort. These would differ so youd probably need to give these some labels for fabrication.
All in all i think it would not be that hard. The hard part may be modifying the mesh (depending on mesh youd use it may be no problem at all). Putting these kind of structure together would probably be most painful part of process 
Thanks @rekoks for your suggestions.
Starting with a triangle mesh from either a group of hand-picked vertices or hand decimation from the scan data sounds like a sane place to begin.
As you say, we could use Grasshopper’s deconstruct mesh tool to get the components, but is there a way to automatically connect this vertex list with pipes to create the steel mesh shown in the above sculpture?
I don’t think we would need to join pipes, but it would help enormously to automatically extrude circles along the paths between vertices rather than model all the tube sections by hand.
That‘s what gh is about 
You can use mesh edges on your final mesh, to get curves. Use kangaroos Duplicated Lines, to cull duplicated ones, and use the lines for pipe component. (Mesh pipe is faster)
If you want nice nodes between, you can have a look at exosceleton or some other plugins.