The Brooklyn Rail

There aren’t many round buildings in the city. But at the corner of Hester St. and Eldridge St. in Manhattan’s Chinatown, there’s an unexpected one. Demure yet bold, the four-story school isn’t taller than its neighbors, but stands out with a figure all its own. Unlike the Guggenheim, surely the city’s most well-known rounded facade, this one isn’t just trying to be different.

The school’s ground levels pull back along the sidewalk, while its upper facades curve out generously, floating above the street. Bands of windows slice through the curved facade, a hint of classrooms within.

While we might imagine buildings are designed only in service of their interior needs, the exterior form of buildings like this one behave as characters in the performance of city life: its figures, edges, and volumes framing views, shaping the idea of neighborhoods, defining how we use streets.

A funny quality of something round is that all its sides can look the same. I’ll confess that for many years I imagined this building had a single iconic cylinder, not three. And yet from the inside, I imagine each curving wall produces an experience exactly the opposite of that exterior sameness: strips of windows gliding over an ever-shifting panorama of the street below.

The school's curved masonry behaves in a way that its neighboring rectilinear buildings cannot—it doesn’t choose which street to face. Any orientation is a front. The building opens grandly not to one street or the other, but obliquely into the intersection itself. In a city of grids, it’s powerful to be round.

These cylindrical facades also point to Chinatown’s transformations. To make room for the school in 1983, at least fifteen buildings filled with apartments, stores, and community spaces were lost, according to historical Sanborn fire-insurance maps. The Chinatown Arts Brigade transformed the school’s rounded facade to protest 2016 rezoning measures, with projections brightly bending around its masonry asking, “Do you know your housing rights?”, lamenting the displacement of Chinatown residents over the last two decades. The organization of artists recognised the school's curves for their visibility, but perhaps also as an image of a changing city.

Its rounded facades aren’t only about visibility. A second cylindrical volume appears at the end of Hester St. meeting the park. Its curved wall unexpectedly centered on Forsyth St. as it dead-ends, as if the building wandered out into the intersection and decided to simply stop and look around, enchanted by the expansive greenway full of city life. The curved volume is a natural resolution to the street as the city grid dissolves into the park. The curved facade echoes the bikers circling around crowds, and seniors making their loops around a track. This is how we move when offered a break from the grid.

In contrast, a third cylindrical facade steps out of the city fabric along Canal St, as onramps looping onto the Manhattan bridge deform the city grid once more. In Canal St’s bustle, the curve is strong and resolute; in the park the curve is generous and open. In both cases, the curving facades are equally at home, adapting to conundrums in the logic of the city. Interrupting Forsyth St. has another benefit too—access to the athletic track without students needing to cross a busy road.

Each of the three cylindrical facades contend with an aberration in the city grid: the edge along fast-paced bridge traffic, the lush collage of recreation in the park, and the scale downshift between a large school and an intimate neighborhood to the East. Like the knuckle of a hinge, each curved masonry wall eases a transition between neighborhoods, grids, and speeds. Though dimensionally the same, each circular facade operates at a very different scale. From the bridge, a landmark; from the park, a curve welcoming pedestrians into the block; and in the neighborhood, opening an intersection to a civic presence.

Built twenty-four years after the Guggenheim, the school certainly learned the way the museum faces out into the city, announcing its publicness, wanting to belong to more than just its own block. It uses a circle of just about the same size to do it, too.

These rounded surfaces also suggest how students and teachers might interact with the city. At the park, the facade curves itself around on the inside of the block too, creating a deep pocket of space for an intimate building entry. Lower floors of red brick add layers of variation, each softly curving in and out, capturing eddies of space for classroom windows, school gardens, and secondary entrances. (These spaces would be better still without so many fences preventing pedestrians from exploring where our eyes already do.) Large scale curves overlay small ones, and multiply into a panoply of diverse spaces along the street, all more playful and supple than a flat facade ever could.

Curved brick walls along the sidewalk have become proud surfaces for murals, colorfully wrapping into the park, transforming urban alcoves into outdoor galleries. East Village Walls has annually renewed a Lunar New Year tribute—I caught the waning days of 2023’s “Some Bunny to Love,” two ten-foot-tall rabbits by artist BKFoxx taking comfort under the curved facade above. Curving walls along Hester St. softly bring student paintings out into the city.

This building shows the potency of bold figures in a tightly-gridded city. It does not act in defiance, but instead in play: a conversation with the city around it. Its curved facades reflect back on the city, and change the experience of the city around them. Its figures let pedestrians contemplate the shifts in scale they allow, the spaces they create for gathering along the park, the neighborhood landmark they present. Its curves help it fit in, but it will never disappear in a city of straight lines.