The drive to engage the external environment, to create, is an essential aspect of our emotional and intellectual development. The built environment should recognize and express it's interdependence with the natural environment as being a holistic habitat. Because the horse can react immediately to our attempts to mold and form it, the poetics of dressage offer insight into the question of balance with concern to the issue of how much artifice we can place upon the natural state of things before we not only begin to destroy them, but endanger ourselves as well. The architect must strive to find balance and harmony between the memory and the imagination through poesis. The design problem is a facility located in Piedmont Park, Atlanta, Georgia designed both to house the dressage events for the 1996 Olympics, and to then be transformed into a riding academy for the city of Atlanta.