Capturing this spirit in ways both grand and subtle, a new campus for Canada's National Ballet School in Toronto effectively melds heritage with modern elegance on a tight site... and a modest budget. At the urban scale, the project centers on Northfield, a Georgian-style house built for statesman Sir Oliver Mowat in 1856. Weaving around the brick pavilion is a U-shaped complex of delicately detailed glass-and-steel volumes on recessed ba
ses, rising up to five stories yet deferring to the streetscape and views of their venerable brick neighbor. Hidden behind, a gently sloped bridge links their internal programs, totaling 180,000 square feet, at a three-story, socializing atrium. Like the long history of ballet, Northfield stands as the symbolic heart of the campus -- a firm pledge to tradition. Just as apt, however, are the clean-edged, transparent volumes that give the old house its up-to-the-minute embrace: After all, the school's academic program covers the best in contemporary ballet, too.
In ways both literal and abstract, the new structures allude to the rhythms and movement of dance. Conceived by Toronto's Kuwabara Payne McKenna Blumberg (KPMB) in a joint venture with coordinating architect Goldsmith, Borgal & Co., the design takes basic building materials -- stone block, curtain wall, metal ceilings -- and makes them boogie. "Most literal is the ceramic fritting of a choregraphic notation system, similar to written music, on a sculptural glass screen for a prominent main facade." But as in choreographing ballet, KPMB's real feats emerge from the reinterpretation and elevation of a few standard moves.
A wall of ground-face masonry cladding, for example, mixes blocks in three harmonious hues, drawing the eye along seemingly random paths of the resulting pattern. (Not trivially, the colors also help obscure the blotchi