The birth of the modern design approach to coordination polymers, often known as metal-organic frameworks (MOFs), has its origins in a remarkable paper published in 1989 by Richard Robson and Bernard Hoskins [1]. The thinking behind it goes back even further, to the mid-1970s. This talk, from the first student in the Robson group to work on coordination polymers, will explore some of the key foundational work that created this new field of chemistry, which now occupies thousands of scientists and engineers around the world, generating dozens of papers a week and more than 100,000 crystal structures to date. It’s a journey that culminated in the awarding of the 2025 Nobel Prize in Chemistry to Richard Robson, Susumu Kitagawa and Omar Yaghi, and is currently being used for applications such as hydrogen storage, carbon capture, heterogenous catalysis and atmospheric water harvesting. A journey that, while still ongoing, started with some simple fundamental questions on how molecules might assemble in the solid state, and a clever idea on how to direct those molecules, underlying the value of pure blue-sky research in a world now obsessed with instant applications.