The Globe and Mail

The architecture of Canada's National Ballet School is pure poetry. Exultant and luminous, the complex on Jarvis Street in downtown Toronto frames the innocence, the strength and the potential of children. No billboard put up by any jeans manufacturer better captures the power of youth, or the struggle to become an adult. Toronto architecture is coming on strong now. If there were doubts in the past that the local talent couldn't measure up against the superstars, those fears can officially be put to rest. The NBS is an intense, exhilarating architecture that pushes and pulls intimately against the street. More than a decade in the imagining, lobbying and making, it convinces absolutely of the need to educate through exceptional architecture, an idea befitting not only gifted dancers but all children in Canada. Elevated above the grimy, disorder of one of Toronto's main streets, young ballerinas work at the barre within inches of a monumental glass curtain wall. Training within double-height studios is their privilege now. What the city gets is a gifted new generation printed on its skyline.