Merlin Bauer’s “Grand Tour” borrows its title from the formative European journey that, since the Renaissance, took young aristocrats across the continent. Bauer photographs contemporary cities and landscapes with a level, unsentimental eye, focusing on the ordinary structures that shape everyday life: fences, billboards, asphalt roads, skyscrapers, box-shaped residential clusters, staked-out building volumes, and artificial rocks. The photographs explore the boundary between order and uncontrolled growth, and the surfaces and underlying systems of both.

The book is published by Hartmann Books. It contains 124 pages and 148 illustrations, measures 23.0 × 27.8 cm, and appears as a softcover with a dust jacket. The texts are by Magdalena Holzhey, Simone Klein, and Jörg Leeser; the design is by Martin Schoberer. The edition is presented in German, English, and French, an arrangement that suits a project whose subject is a shared European inheritance and what has been made of it.

In the publisher’s account, Bauer’s practice examines how historically evolved urban planning, architecture, and cultural policy shape public life, and the book extends that engagement into printed form. It invites readers to look again at the built environment and the politics of public space.