Bottom-up approaches

These seek to arrange smaller components into more complex assemblies.
DNA nanotechnology utilizes the specificity of Watson–Crick basepairing to construct well-defined structures out of DNA and other nucleic acids.
Approaches from the field of "classical" chemical synthesis also aim at designing molecules with well-defined shape (e.g. bis-peptides.
More generally, molecular self-assembly seeks to use concepts of supramolecular chemistry, and molecular recognition in particular, to cause single-molecule components to automatically arrange themselves into some useful conformation.