"Nanoscience promises innovative solutions in a large variety of sectors, ranging from cost-effective optoelectronic devices to energy generation, and to highly performing materials and interfaces. Realizing this promise will rely heavily on a bottom-up approach. This can only succeed if self assembly of advanced nanoscale building blocks will be developed intensively, to enable creation of useful macroscopic architectures. The unconventional assembly of nanocrystals towards functional materials is the area where this proposal aims at providing a key contribution. This will be achieved via ground-breaking advances in the fabrication of shape controlled nanocrystals, via solution approaches, in their organization following radically new concepts and in the study of their assembly related properties. The bottom line here is to tune the assembly process of nanocrystals so as to generate a desired functionality or a combination of functionalities. This would represent a dramatic leap forward from the trial-and-error approach to controlling the various properties that is currently prevalent in many of the communities working in the field of nanocrystals. The primary motivation of this proposal is therefore to correlate strongly the structural properties with the behaviour of nanostructured assemblies. This is clearly a cutting edge research program, at the frontier of chemistry, physics, materials science and engineering, and whose successful outcome will be of tremendous benefit in several fields."