Serving as a physical and virtual symbol of the school's tradition of global service and innovative initiatives, the new SIS Building will provide a vibrant center for teaching, research, and public dialogue. It will enhance the school's distinctive identity as a cross-national scholar, practitioner, and student community dedicated to improving policy and practice world-wide. The very process of constructing the building, with careful attention to environmental challenges, will itself serve as a learning model.

The new SIS Building should capture the school's distinctive excellence in international affairs education, professional training, and international exchange and should provide the physical structure to take the school to an even higher level of international service leadership.

This can be done by creating classrooms, offices, and common areas that can better enable the school to do what it already does so well and by incorporating architectural and engineering design principles that demonstrate how buildings themselves can incorporate answers to world problems.

The twenty-first century world faces three distinct challenges to which the school has long been committed: global poverty, violent conflict, and environmental degradation. Each SIS program focuses on at least one of these issues and has made significant contributions to understanding them and to equipping students with tools to confront them. The new SIS Building can illustrate this commitment in its structural and aesthetic character.