IArchitecturally, Buenos Aires city can be divided into four main residential constructions and numerous styles that depend of the vogue at the time built.

The most common architecture in Buenos Aires was single-family dwellings along streets that form a grid system much like New York. These house s had an interior patio or garden and rows of small rooms down either side of the house that lead to the kitchen. These house s were attached one to another to form an unbroken facade and sidewalk. The best and most accessible examples found today are in San Telmo. Many of these impressive Quintas became the infamous conventillos of the late 19 th and early 20 th centuries.

As population density increased in the early XX century Buenos Aires' architecture changed, houses were broken up into smaller units and gave rise to a second style, a two and three-story house known as a petit hotel, which was neither as wide nor as deep as its predecessor.
The lots on which these houses were constructed defined the size of the first generation of high-rise apartment buildings that grew piecemeal and now dominate the middle-class sections of the city in Plaza San Martin, Palermo and Recoleta.

These apartment high rises, representing a third style, were built one next one another, stretching for block after block in the northern sector of the city. In Belgrano, just north of Barrio Norte, these apartment houses/mansions/buildings are freestanding; many are as large as city blocks, with their own gardens, because they were built on the lots of single-family detached dwellings that were common in outer-districts of Buenos Aires City and the suburban partidos.

The fourth residential style of Architecture in Buenos Aires is the bleak corrugated metal shacks, typical of the shantytowns that constitute approximately one-fourth of the homes in the metropolitan area and house about 30 percent of the population. These settlements are characterised by their precarious tenure and the absence of basic public services. While such settlements are common to large cities, they have become a significant aspect of the urban landscape in Buenos Aires since the 1960s. These villas miserias, or popular settlements as they are officially known, are largely inhabited by rural migrants who felt that they could improve their condition by moving to the city of Buenos Aires.