ROWHOUSE RECONFIGURED

From the New York brownstone to the Shanghai shop house, the rowhouse enjoys widespread success as an urban housing type. A mid-rise infill development in Buenos Aires, designed by Argentinean firm Canda Gazaneo Unga, illustrates the rich potential of this type, translating it into an elegant modern idiom, and configuring it to achieve contemporary urban densities. Next week, writer and designer Katharine Logan will explain how the firm has provided small-house living at condominium densities.

MODULAR BUILDING AT YALE

When you hear "modular classroom building," what do you think of? Cheap gray boxes on cinderblocks? Tacky trailers covered with vinyl "brick" siding? Such makeshift classrooms are piled next to schools and colleges all over the United States — temporary solutions to space shortages that seem to hang around for years. But a temporary building designed by Mark Simon, of Centerbrook Architects, is a lesson in how to make a silk purse out of a sow's ear. Next week, ArchitectureWeek contributing editor Michael J. Crosbie will show how, in the sleek, crisply detailed temporary structure at Yale University, off-the-shelf modular pods have never looked so good.