Architectured Structural Materials: A Parallel Between Nature and Engineering

Nature builds materials like an architect to obtain a variety of properties with a limited number of building blocks. In contrast, engineers have access to a wide range of constituent materials to fulfil a variety of requirements. The classical degrees of freedom for controlling the properties of man-made materials are the microstructure, or the macroscopic shape. Only recently, the architecture at the millimetre scale was perceived as an …