Between 2014 and 2016, Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre entered 400 of Budapest’s more than 4,000 internal courtyards. The resulting photographs examine an architectural world largely concealed behind the city’s street façades: shared spaces where housing, circulation and domestic life meet. Rather than treating individual buildings as isolated monuments, Budapest Courtyards considers the courtyard as a recurring urban form.

The photographers approach their subject systematically, building a typological series from structures that vary widely in age and style. Classical ornament, modern interventions, weathered surfaces and practical alterations coexist within the same field of study. Repetition establishes a comparative rhythm, while differences in proportion, decoration and condition prevent the courtyards from becoming interchangeable specimens. The method is measured, but the evidence remains socially charged.

These interiors register more than architectural change. They bear traces of Budapest’s shifting political regimes and economy, as well as the incremental adjustments made by residents to collective housing. Decay appears alongside maintenance and improvisation; historical design is continually revised by present use. The book therefore presents the courtyards not as a sealed inheritance, but as inhabited structures in which several periods of the city remain simultaneously visible.

Published by Steidl as a 180-page hardcover, the volume gives substantial space to a tightly defined and unusually extensive body of work. Its importance for a photobook collection lies in the conjunction of architectural record, urban history and sustained photographic classification. Marchand and Meffre make a familiar building type newly legible through accumulation: each image describes one place, while the series reveals the scale and variety of a civic fabric seldom visible from the street.