Since the curtain rose on the art form in the 17th century, classical ballet has required its practitioners to leap, lift, and chass' onstage while making it all appear as effortless as a two-step. A 1914-era former coal power plant for the nearby Union Station train depot, then, isn't as unlikely a home for Missouri's Kansas City Ballet (KCB) as it may seem at first. It embodies the kind of industriousness and strength required to be a dancer. 'There is something counterintuitive about putting a ballet school beside a rail yard,' admits Steve McDowell, principal and design director at the Kansas City'based architecture firm BNIM. But the dissonance is a good thing, McDowell says: the building and its site gave the architects an opportunity to respond to the 'muscularity and form of the human body' in motion while they created a new home for the city's ballet company and its school.

The KCB's former home was scheduled for demolition to make way for Moshe Safdie's Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts (for which BNIM was the architect of record), completed in 2011. Though the professional company would be staging productions in this new arts center, it set out to find another location for its school, rehearsal spaces, and administrative offices. The disused plant'known as the Power House'was part of a greater city plan to redevelop the area with Union Station at the heart of the project. It was an unusually advantageous option for the company because of its double-height ceilings and generous square footage. 'The city considered the Power House for offices, a nightclub, a whole host of uses,' says McDowell. But it lay vacant for 30 years until the ballet company set its sights on it.