Sculptor Paul Kroner recently began developing a new body of work that immediately felt bigger than the studio it was made in. "These weren't pieces meant for pedestals in a gallery. They were sculptures that wanted space-urban plazas, sculpture gardens, corporate campuses. Some could stand five or six feet tall. Others could easily scale to twenty or thirty," notes photographer Teri Campbell. There was only one problem: none of Kroner's pieces existed at that scale yet. Scaling one up into a full-size prototype would be a major investment, especially without a confirmed commission. That's where artificial intelligence came in handy.

  Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc (1814–1879) was a visionary French architect who, among other things, devised the structural system that made it possible for Gustav Eiffel’s Statue of Liberty to sport a skin of self-oxidizing copper. His approach to materials was: understand the properties and the form will ensue. Many years later, this idea was popularized by Louis Sullivan, who coined the phrase, “Form Follows Function”—a statement widely considered ...