The New York Times identified it as "the first building in the United States to be designed and constructed exclusively for the use of a major ballet company.

The Boston Globe noted, "Dance people don't merely visit the San Francisco Ballet building: They make pilgrimages to it.

It is among the world's leading dance companies, presenting over 100 performances annually, with a repertoire that spans both classical and contemporary ballet.

In the late 1970s, the company was housed in a renovated parking garage on 18th Avenue, San Francisco, in a downstairs studio with ceilings so low that the dancers could not practice lifts for fear of hitting the beams.

While the project would serve as a prototype for new ballet schools nationwide, the design was required to extend deference to the classical order of the Civic Center's architecture, characterized by grandeur of scale, simplicity of geometric forms, and dramatic use of columns.

To accomplish this, Willis incorporated elements of the Neo-Renaissance architectural vocabulary of the Civic Center− the rectangular geometry and the horizontal tripartite divisions of the base, middle and top, whose heights correspond to the opera house.

To be successfully contextual, it needed to appear massive to sustain a visual relationship with the monumental civic center buildings occupying over a square block.

The horizontal divisions of the base, midsection and top, as part of the facade, matched the heights of those of the adjacent civic center buildings.