Building inorganic supramolecular architectures using principles adopted from the organic solid state.

In order to develop transferable and practical avenues for the assembly of coordination complexes into architectures with specific dimensionality, a strategy utilizing ligands capable of simultaneous metal coordination and self-complementary hydrogen bonding is presented. The three ligands used, 2(1)-pyrazinone, 4(3)-pyrimidinone and 4(3)-quinazolinone, consistently deliver the required synthetic vectors in a series of Cd coordination polymers, allowing for reproducible supramolecular synthesis that is insensitive to the different steric and geometric demands from potentially disruptive counterions. In all nine crystallographically characterized compounds presented here, directional intermolecular N-H⋯O hydrogen bonds between ligands on adjacent complex building blocks drive the assembly and orientation of discrete building blocks into largely predictable topologies.