Yves Marchand Knihy

“The state of ruin is essentially a temporary situation that happens at some point, the volatile result of a change of era and the fall of empires. Ruins are a fantastic land where one no longer knows whether reality slips into a dream or whether, on the contrary, dream makes a brutal return into the most violent of realities.” Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre Over the past generation Detroit has suffered economically worse than any other of the major American cities and its rampant urban decay is now glaringly apparent. Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre have documented this disintegration, showcasing structures that were formerly a source of civic pride, and which now stand as monuments to the city’s fall from grace. This is the third edition of this award-winning book. Born in 1981 and 1987 in the Parisian suburbs, Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre began to photograph separately in 2001. They began to work as a duo at the beginning of their project on the ruins of Detroit in 2005.

Between 2014 and 2016, Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre visited 400 of the more than 4,000 internal courtyards in Budapest. Their large number and variety of styles incorporating different facets of classicism and modernity make them a remarkable architectural phenomenon—a charming second city within the city. Marchand and Meffre systematically documented these courtyards, producing a typological series that describes this particular form of collective housing and reflects the city’s tumultuous history, its changing political regimes and economy. Budapest Courtyards allows us to delight in the crumbling grandeur of the courtyards, and observe the developments and personal strategies of adaptation which they evidence.