This review emphasizes recent or pertinent efforts to create functional plasticity with artificial barrel-stave supramolecules and related motifs. On the structural level, a summary of engineered, de novo designed, and artificial ß-barrels beyond peptide chemistry is followed by representative a-helix bundles and barrel-stave supramolecules comprising oligonucleotides, inorganic architecture, and organic barrel-stave ion channel models. On the functional level, selected examples are given to highlight divers aspects of molecular recognition, translocation, and transformation that are currently accessible with artificial barrel-stave supramolecules.