The School of Architecture at UIC promotes architecture as a cultural practice of organizing information, of intelligently identifying and deploying patterns—conceptual, visual, structural, behavioral, and material—in the world. The program prepares its graduates to project all scales of these spatial and organizational patterns through the systematic development of an aesthetic attitude, a technical confidence, and a theoretical opportunism.
When deployed creatively, architecture and urban design are two of the most powerful tools available to remake the world as an artifact of our desires, ethics, and ideologies. Informed by a contemporary and historical understanding of its discipline and location, the School of Architecture ventures to liberate and install new forms of collective association and material arrangement through all media of architectural design and research. Consistent with this commitment, the School recognizes its primary mission to prepare graduates to think, negotiate, and collaborate through all genres of design; to direct diverse project teams; and to generate design artifacts and arguments with a contemporary cultural and disciplinary resonance.