Over the past decade, supramolecular compounds with organometallic Ir, Rh, Ru based half-sandwich complexes have received considerable attention as materials with a variety of potential applications. The major emphasis of this tutorial review lies on the self-assembly of such organometallic half-sandwich molecular rectangles, prisms and cages with half-sandwich corners and two different rigid bifunctional ligands using an approach of stepwise construction. Synthetic methods and the structural and functional properties of the target complexes are discussed in detail.

Isolated and well-defined cyclometalated iridium/rhodium complexes that contain a Cp*M–C (M = Ir, Rh) bond stabilised by the intramolecular coordination of neutral donor atoms (N, C, O or P), together with their applications, were summarized.

Continuous study on preparation of multimetallic clusters is stimulated by their rich coordination chemistry and promising applications in a variety of interesting fields. Although numerous efforts have been devoted to this field, the rational design of homo- and hetero-multimetallic compounds with direct metal–metal bonding supported by 1,2-dicarba-closo-dodecarborane-1,2-dichalcogenolates will still be an important step forward. This tutorial review focuses on the synthetic approach via redox reactions between the pseudo-aromatic half-sandwich oraganometallic carborane precursors and low-valent transition metal reagents. The tailoring of reaction conditions and the structural information from the resulting products are discussed extensively.