The department is committed to the study of architecture as a cultural discipline in which issues of practice, of the multiplicity of social formations in which buildings exist, and of environmental effects are integrated with building design through construction, space, material, form and use. Architecture arises from the aspirations that diverse individuals and groups have for their physical environment, and from the social enterprise of designing and fabricating the landscape we inhabit. It involves individual and multiple buildings, the spaces within them, and the exterior landscape.

ISU's program intends the following for students: that they develop the skills with which to critically assess and research architectural questions and to invent architectural designs that address those questions; that they develop a working method for designing using communication, graphic, modeling and computational skills to support design exploration and to represent their design ideas to others; that they gain knowledge of architectural technologies through which buildings are given form, of which they are constructed and by which they are environmentally tuned and made sustainable; that they understand architectural history, that they understand the theoretical and diverse cultural underpinnings of the discipline of architecture, that they are able to reference architectural precedents and know how to utilize all of these in the development of their ideas; and that they have a grounding in the ethical and practical aspects of the architectural profession in society.