Like movies stars, buildings from our past are often smaller than we imagine.  That’s true of the ones in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where I attended architecture school.  I was visiting last weekend, seventeen years after I graduated, and the whole place felt much more welcoming than I remember.  It was a clear afternoon and the leaves, which had turned gold, set off the brick buildings and cloudless sky brilliantly.  I circled the Yard on streets barely wide enough for two cows to pass, with university buildings lined up along them just like in a storybook village.

But one building remained as large and looming, as truly monstrous, as I remember it – Sever Hall.  This undergraduate classroom building is a classic by the great nineteenth-century American architect Henry Hobson Richardson.  It sits back several hundred feet from the street, like a grounded ocean liner.  It’s grave and god-fearing, with an aspect of discipline and renunciation.  Its fortress-like brick facades are broken with small, deep windows and elaborate ornamental terracotta bands.  (What happened to these masonry traditions?  Did they simply vanish?)  I remember Cambridge as a place that offered no respite, imaginatively or physically, whose structures were arch and overbearing.  While the city no longer feels that way, Sever Hall still does.

I was at PS 1 in Astoria this weekend to attend a symposium called “Foreclosed,” about housing in America.  I walked through the courtyard installation, a series of white cables that shaped ghostly curved surfaces in the air.  And I saw the exhibit of art made in response to 9/11.  But what impressed me most was the architecture of the museum, which is housed in an old public school.

There’s nothing subtle, nothing graceful, about it.  The school is a hulking, symmetrical, red brick building with stiff facades and severe proportions.  The original structure and finishes have been left in place.  There are rough brick walls and wire security cages in the stairwells, and tile arches in the ceilings.  And the long hallways have checkerboard linoleum floors sealed in layers of varnish, and sagging oak doors leading into the classrooms.  A friend, an architect and native New Yorker, explained that the building design was once standard for New York public schools.  Some would find the institutional feeling oppressive, especially in relation to the forward-looking art.  But I found it, on that day, particularly reassuring.  In contrast with the symposium, which offered cerebral propositions about housing and living, the building offered shelter and space.

What’s the difference between a townhouse and a row house, and does it really matter?  Both types of homes are fitted between high side walls and offer slender, discrete facades to the street.  But “townhouse” conjures images of well-heeled urban living, with all the attendant pretensions, while “row house” implies something altogether less formal and prepossessing.

A visited a friend who lives in a three-story brick row house near Frederick Douglass Square in Boston, and now I’m convinced that it’s the best kind of house.  A row house balances the privacy and freedom of a detached house with the security of an apartment.  It grants an inveterate urbanite his own street entrance, rooftop and yard, while keeping him connected to neighbors and the city.  And the spread of space inside, a straight shot through from sidewalk to back yard, offers both compressed urban energy and a sense of suburban ease.