As I understand it, this is not really how most practical materials research is done today. Bridging the "scale gap" between nano-scale research, micro-scale re

As I understand it, this is not really how most practical materials research is done today. Bridging the "scale gap" between nano-scale research, micro-scale research, etc. up to something the size of a foundation for a skyscraper is very hard (read: almost impossible) right now. Those nano-scale research areas are pretty siloed and only in extreme cases like transistor manufacturing is there any meaningful overlap with production use cases. In general, materials researchers for something like concrete are going to be better off exploring the (very large!) high dimensional space of possible formulations of existing concrete ingredients and pushing out the pareto frontier for the best possible concrete that way. Also, one probably shouldn't be using bleeding-edge concrete tech for a skyscraper foundation - in a safety critical application like that you just build it 1.2x bigger than you need and it'll still be much cheaper and safer than a process like what you just described. Materials research is super interesting, though, even if it's not building up from quantum-particle scale research. And atomic / molecular features of inputs can yield interesting material candidates. Source: I work (as a software dev, not a materials researcher) at Citrine Informatics, selling software to assist companies who are trying to do practical materials things like make better concrete.