A fundamental difference between living and nonliving solutions to engineering problems, which usually makes the living ones superior, is the growth and self-assembly of living organisms. We call this ``biosynthesis'' and we propose to build it into engineered artifacts that are not restricted to biological technologies. The results of this strategy will be to give engineered systems the characteristics that living ones enjoy by virtue of their growth and development: self-repair, robustness, scaling from small to large systems, and the stunning effectiveness of evolutionary optimization as a design procedure which acts on biological systems through their growth rules and developmental history.