A combinatorial construction is used to analyze the properties of polyhedral products [1] and generalized moment-angle complexes with respect to certain operations on CW pairs including exponentiation. This allows for the construction of infinite families of toric manifolds, associated to a given one, in a way that simplifies the combinatorial input and, consequently, the presentation of the cohomology rings. The new input is the interaction of a purely combinatorial construction with natural associated geometric constructions related to polyhedral products and toric manifolds. Applications of the methods and results developed here have appeared in [24, 25, 15, 18, 10, 23], and [19].