Abstract Natural porous materials have exceptional properties—for example, light weight, mechanical resilience, and multi‐functionality. Efforts to imitate their properties in engineered structures have limited success. This, in part, is caused by the complexity of multi‐phase materials composites and by the lack of quantified understanding of each component's role in overall hierarchy. This challenge is twofold: 1) computational. because non‐periodicity and defects render constructing design guidelines between geometries and mechanical properties complex and expensive and 2) experimental. because the fabrication and characterization of complex, often hierarchical and non‐periodic 3D architectures is non‐trivial.