Even to this day, my hobbies still involve go-kart racing and restoring old cars. We also created numerous models from scratch, culminating in what were known as a series of “destructos”, i.e., vehicles that were indestructible and saved the world from disasters ( Figure 2C), inspired by the cartoon show “The Thunderbirds”. As children we raced and worked on go-karts. My neighbor from age 7, Brian Heidsiek, became an industrial designer himself. Growing up in a household with a father that was both an artist and a mechanic, it became natural to build plastic and balsawood models as a hobby and to work on motorized vehicles. As he aged, his need to express creativity converted to being an auto mechanic, restoring old Jaguars and Porsches to the level of award winning Concours D’Elegance vehicles. My house and garage are filled with the most wonderful renderings of airplane parts ( Figure 2A), as well as large oil paintings of other industrial and mechanical structures, such a locomotives ( Figure 2B). Before becoming an art and drafting teacher at a Glendale Community College, he was the art director at Marquardt Corporation. In World War II and later he worked as an artist rendering exquisitely detailed charcoal sketches, and airbrush mock-ups of airplane and ram-jet parts. My father, Samuel Anslyn Jr., was an industrial artist. This combination of art and function undoubtedly had a large influence on why my career transitioned into the field of supramolecular chemistry. Thus, not only are the assembled chemical entities visually striking, they also have real-life practical applications. These functions range from imparting mechanical changes, to altering material properties, to manipulating biological ramifications. Keywords: art assembly complexity function mechanical supramolecularīesides having an aspect of beauty, supramolecular structures are created to achieve a chemical function or task. Therefore, in retrospect a career in supramolecular chemistry appears to be simply an extension of childhood hobbies involving art and auto-mechanics. Analogously, the field of supramolecular chemistry creates systems of high complexity that achieve functions or perform tasks. In addition to art, my childhood was filled with repairing and constructing mechanical entities, such as internal combustion motors, where many components work together to achieve a function. This similarity was an early draw for me to the fields of supramolecular chemistry and molecular orbital theory, because I grew up in a household filled with art. Pictures of electron orbitals similarly can be seen as akin to works of art. For synthetic ease, the receptors and assemblies routinely possess a high degree of symmetry, which lends them an aspect of aesthetic beauty. While the strict definition of supramolecular chemistry is “chemistry beyond the molecule”, meaning having a focus on non-covalent interactions, the field is primarily associated with the creation of synthetic receptors and self-assembly.
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