Landscape architecture is an environmental design discipline. Landscape architects actively shape the human environment: they map, interpret, imagine, draw, build, conceptualize, synthesize, and project ideas that transform landscapes. The design process involves creative expression that derives from an understanding of the context of site (or landscape) ecosystems, cultural frameworks, functional systems, and social dynamics. Students in the program learn to change the world around them by re-imagining and re-shaping the landscape to enhance its aesthetic and functional dimensions, ecological health, cultural significance, and social relevance. The profession addresses a broad range of landscapes in urban, suburban, rural, and wilderness settings. The scale of landscape architecture projects varies from broad, regional landscape analysis and planning to detailed, individual site-scale designs. The curriculum at Iowa State prepares students for this challenge as they develop their abilities to design and communicate ideas through a sequence of foundational courses and studios. The program seeks to produce graduates who understand the ethical, social, and environmental/ecological dimensions of issues involving changes in the landscape.

Graduates are active in a broad range of careers, such as sustainable site design, land development, park management, environmental advocacy, community planning, urban design, and others. In their professional lives, graduates apply their creative and technical skills in the planned arrangement of natural and constructed elements on the land with a concern for the stewardship and conservation of natural, constructed, and human resources. The resulting environments serve useful, aesthetic, safe, and enjoyable purposes. Graduates are able to communicate effectively with colleagues in the sciences and humanities as well as in the allied professions, and are prepared to work individually and in multidisciplinary teams to address complex problems dealing with the cultural/ecological environment.