Chemical strategies to design textured materials: From microporous and mesoporous oxides to nanonetworks and hierarchical structures

The ability to assemble and organize inorganic, organic, and even biological components in a single material represents an exciting direction for developing novel multifunctional materials presenting a wide range of novel properties. The tuning of the nature, the extent, the accessibility, and the curvature of the hybrid interfaces is a key point in the design of new nanostructured materials. An overview is given on the chemical tools that are necessary to construct silica-structures by soft chemistry processes. The most relevant work produced in this field from 1992 to the present is carefully discussed.