The lowest level of the Dance and Architecture building is lit by cuts through the building above, each one traced by cascading water. Tucked among the cars are temporary vendor’s stalls and a model staging area, to be shared by architectural models and sets under construction. At the lowest level, in a workshop along a row of dormer windows, architects and set designers alike would face a 145’ long alley of fountains supplying pools and the site’s canal, muffling the noise of the dance studios. A pedestrian would ascend into each building by reversing the downward path traced by the flow of water, climbing up through the cuts on open stairways into the floors above. At the upper levels the dance and architecture studios, libraries, and office space are linked by a series of linear arcades and punctuating terraces, which stage opportunities for reciprocal viewing between the two occupant communities.

The more massive building to the west of the central entry ramp is a black-box theater seating 500 on a combination of fixed seating and moveable bleachers. The interior of the theater is inspired by the designs of a Swiss turn-of-the-century stage designer of Wagner’s operas named Adolphe Appia, who used movable steps and platforms to create a changeable set on which actors could move up, down, and around in any direction, deliberately transgressing the traditional proscenium plane.

This building performs some fancy footwork, but not by building in riddles for us to solve. This is architecture that refuses to play dumb, neither modest in its intelligence nor refusing to speak. Like a tap-dancer it shows off its assets with a flourish and a twirl. And while all its clients’ functional requirements are conscientiously provided for in well-appointed rooms of the correct size and arrangement, it is the paths between the rooms that soften their edges and their differences one from the other. A body in this architectural system would move through it like a paper boat.

This is a blurry architecture that allows for its own potential dissolution, leaving room for unforeseen influences and change and the occasional hesitation and doubling-back. Its circulation passages erode it from within and all around, as if its massing is out of focus. We could squint to try to make it out more clearly, but why? The building is not protecting itself from its own internal threats. Its two clients do not protect themselves from each other. The only separation, that of the acoustically protecting fountains, is so elegant a device as to conceal its own role as concealment — like the beautifully carved arabesques of Victorian wood molding.

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