8 Propspect Street occupies part of the site where Yale plans to build two residential colleges. (Chronicle photographs by Lawrence Biemiller)

New Haven, Conn. — Yale University officials conducted one of their occasional tours for architecture writers yesterday, and the focus was on renovating campus buildings by the great Modernist Eero Saarinen — Ingalls Rink and Morse and Stiles Colleges. We'll have more about the Saarinen buildings in a couple of days, but for now suffice it to say that the rainy walk over to the hockey rink led right past what a New Haven Advocate writer picked as the "Best Doomed Building in the City" — a Yale building known simply as 8 Prospect Place.

It's far from being either historic or grandiose. In fact, it was always intended as a temporary structure, as its corrugated-steel exterior seems to suggest. Designed in just three months by Centerbrook Architects and Planners and constructed in four more, it consists of 21 modular units that were assembled in a factory in Milford, Conn., and trucked to the campus, where they were set on concrete piers. Highway clearance restrictions kept the height low, as the Yale Daily News pointed out in a review in 2002.

Indeed, it's the building's sleek, low profile that makes it so appealing, especially because the silver-painted, emphatically horizontal siding contrasts so perfectly with the trees among which 8 Prospect Place sits. Its windows — arranged, the architects say, "in Fibonacci rhythms" — are its other main feature: No two sets are alike. The glass-walled entrance, set under an overhang supported on plain columns, is at the back of a stone-paved court animated by a tree, three benches, a silver-painted rack to which bikes can be locked, and railings for steps and a ramp. The interior is plain — Yale wasn't looking to spend a lot of money on temporary offices — but the ceiling, the architects note, "is animated by a de Stijl patterning of standard ceiling lights."

Half of the building is still occupied, but demolition is under way just across the street as the university prepares for the eventual construction of two new residential colleges designed by Robert A.M. Stern, dean of architecture. So now would be a good time to stop by 8 Prospect Street for a look, before it's too late. Unless, of course, the university takes up the New Haven Advocate writer's excellent suggestion that the building be sold for $1 to a purchaser who can remove and reuse it.