Hallways – Romain Laprade

Hallways, RVB Books 2026: Romain Laprade photographs mosaics, letterboxes and light fittings in the entrance halls of Parisian residential buildings from the 1950s to the 1980s

Hallways is a photographic volume published by RVB Books, dedicated to the entrance halls of Parisian residential buildings and to the threshold understood as a designed space rather than a passage. The buildings date from the 1950s to the 1980s, the decades in which post-war construction reshaped housing in Paris and the lobby became a field for experiment — in material, in colour, in the geometry of a wall or a floor. The book approaches these interiors as a vocabulary — of surfaces, of fixtures, of details that residents cross every day and rarely look at.

The publication collects several years of work by French photographer Romain Laprade, who walked the city in search of these halls. A text by Jean-Claude Girard accompanies the images and reads the entrance hall as a transitional place, held between the street and the home. Running through the volume is an attention to the elements that compose these rooms — mosaics, reflective surfaces, lettering, light fittings, letterboxes shaped like sculpture — and to how they define the first experience of a building.

Photography here functions as sequence and as abstraction: the halls are removed from their façades and addresses, and ordered by correspondences of form, pattern and light from one page to the next. Neither typology nor architectural history, the book keeps to what the eye meets on entering. It is a softcover with flaps, published in French and English and issued with two covers, brown and yellow.

/ publisher RVB Books
/ photography Romain Laprade
/ text Jean-Claude Girard
/ publication 2026
/ softcover with flaps
/ two covers: brown, yellow
/ 368 pages
/ colour and black-and-white illustrations
/ 23 × 28 cm
/ french, english

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