The Historical Development of the Concepts Underlying the Design and Construction of Targeted Coordination Polymers/MOFs: A Personal Account

Presented here is a personal account of how the ideas and concepts underlying the design and construction of coordination polymers/MOFs developed historically - from the earliest conjectures in the 1970's about the possibility of using pre-organized building blocks to construct targeted polymeric structures, to the initial experimental implementation of these ideas in the mid-80's and to the introduction of the name MOFs in the 90's. The early exploratory work with pre-organized building blocks described in this article paved the way for the subsequent explosion of research activity in the CP/MOF area and for the generation of an essentially unlimited range of designed coordination polymer structures promising a variety of useful properties. A pre-organized metallo-porphyrin substituted by four 4-pyridyl donors directed outwards towards the corners of a square, seen here providing the square planar node in a coordination polymer framework with a planned PtS-related structure - a key result, published in 1994, in the historical development of coordination networks-by-design. image