European architecture question(s)

[ritaxis]

So you've got a block of buildings with an open space in the middle. It might be buildings from the Middle Ages that just survived till the present day, or it might be ones from later on, but you have the same thing, tenements (or rowhouses or apartments, whatever) all tightly closed around a space in the middle.  In back of all those buildings, whatever direction you come from.  What do you call that space?

I've been calling it the yard, though in my brief European forays I do not seem to have noticed that anybody in particular seems to think of it as their yard. When I was in Prague I didn't visit any apartments in a block like that, I just passed by them, and I could rarely see through the passageways into the (yards).  The passageways clearly went right through the buildings to the back, but they were usually closed off by gates.  The few yards I could see looked kind of underutilized: not landscaped, but not full of either stuff people were using or garbage either.  I saw a couple of trees, but they looked like weed trees. 


For that matter, what do you call a block like that?  Sometimes it looks like the whole thing is one thing, other times they are obviously not.  And what do you call those passageways?

I did get to visit a very pleasant Soviet-era apartment building (panalok), and an apartment carved out of a neo-baroque former film studio, and a dormitory(kolej) in  a former Soviet-era motel.  So I have seen what some of the cheap housing in Prague looks like, but not all of it.

On another front, I had my last physical therapy of this run (and no doubt I will have more of them in the future), and while I took today off work as a preemptive move, I did not stay up all night with pain after the deep tissue massage.  Rather, I woke up now and then to a highly annoying but by no means unbearable single point of pain.  Win!

Comments

[green-knight.livejournal.com]

In German, it's 'Hof' or 'Hinterhof' - I'd use courtyard as the English term. (Hinterhöfe in large cities were notorious for sprouting futher buildings which then had no light at all and which were generally unhealthy places to live.)

'yard' on its own often refers to one's backyard - an area associated wih an individual house, usually fenced, paved, and often used to simply dump rubbish (as well as, in previous times, containing an outhouse, coal bunker, wood store, shed...) and, of course, the rubbish bin as well as somewhere you dump ashes.

The area outside the row of houses where I live (ten houses in all) where we park our cars and have gardens is definitely a 'yard' - it's open and fairly large.

(I'd probably be more likely to use courtyard if it's paved and entirely enclosed.)