In 2006 I received a commission from Submeta to create a bronze for the Beckman Institute at Urbana-Champaign. 

We quickly settled on a version of the Flow design as being suitable for the institution and possible to fabricate.  The location is on the axis of the main building at Beckman, in a narrow area between two larger spaces, and the twofold symmetry of this piece fits well.

I began by making a 3D CAD model of the piece, with several changes from the smaller bronze version I'd originally made.  We figured out early that the casting would be roughly 30 inches tall.  The new wavy texture brings out the form, and also reduce the thickness and weight of the bronze.  I began talks with Steve at Reinmuth Bronze, a superb artist and caster who's experienced with mathematical sculpture, and we soon agreed on method and budget, as well as working together to design a fabricated steel base.  Steve doesn't use CAD, so we emailed and faxed lots of sketches.
 

The design as a whole isn't moldable, so I broke it down into simpler modules.
 

I had one instance of each module printed in plaster on a large-format ZCorp machine.
 

These went to the foundry, where a rubber mold was made of each.
 

Wax duplicates of each module were made and carefully hand finished. 
 

The wax parts were dipped in ceramic slurry, dusted with sand, and dipped again to make ceramic shell molds.  These are fired to harden them and remove the wax, to get ready for the bronze pour...