A.C. Documentos de Actividad Contemporánea (commonly A.C.—the acronym is generally read as standing for both “Contemporary Activity,” the title under which the journal was actually published, and “Contemporary Architecture,” the group’s original project name) was the principal editorial platform of GATEPAC, the Grupo de Artistas y Técnicos Españoles para el Progreso de la Arquitectura Contemporánea, founded in Zaragoza in 1930 to coordinate modernist groups in Barcelona, Madrid and San Sebastián. GATCPAC was the Catalan section, which became GATEPAC’s eastern branch and its most active editorial core. Produced in Barcelona and directed by Josep Lluís Sert and Josep Torres Clavé, A.C. appeared quarterly from 1931 to 1937, reaching issue no. 25 across twenty-four physical fascicles, since nos. 23–24 were issued as a single double number. Though its intellectual groundwork predated the Spanish Second Republic, the journal was born with it and died with the Civil War.
Published mainly in Spanish, with growing Catalan content (the double issue 23–24 of 1936 was largely Catalan, and the strikingly trilingual Catalan-Spanish-French no. 25 of 1937 closed the run), A.C. pursued a selective editorial line: it privileged projects with a clearly codified modern language, militant rationalism, while excluding other contemporary sensibilities and idioms regarded as ambiguously modern. Its fascination with Mediterranean vernacular architecture followed the same logic, read through the lens of formal abstraction rather than folkloric or regionalist concerns.
Despite its outsized influence on the Spanish architectural avant-garde, A.C.’s material base was modest and unstable. The print run began at 2,000 copies for no. 1, fell to 1,500 for no. 2 after a weak reception, and thereafter oscillated between 1,000 and 1,800 depending on the group’s finances. Direct, fixed subscriptions remained few for a journal of this reach: about 150 in July 1931, rising to roughly 250 in specific later issues and to 350 by June 1933. Bookshop sales were similarly exiguous; the journal functioned less as a mass-market product than as a militant organ and instrument of international projection for GATEPAC, and non-payment among subscribers was chronic. Financing combined subscriptions, single-copy sales, advertising and, above all, members’ dues, leaving the publication permanently in deficit. Distribution nonetheless reached libraries, institutions and private addresses across some two dozen countries in Europe and the Americas.
A.C. operated within the CIAM/CIRPAC networks and maintained close exchanges with Giedion, Moser, MARS, Praesens and TECTON, besides Neutra and Le Corbusier, whose collaboration with GATCPAC in Barcelona was well represented in the magazine (no. 13). Thematically it addressed housing (notably the workers’-housing issue no. 11), the functional city (nos. 12 and 20), schools (nos. 9–10), America’s mobility utopias represented in Richard Neutra’s Rush City project (no. 15), hygiene and bathing (no. 22), popular Mediterranean architecture (nos. 17–19), and, in its final wartime issues (23–25), an increasingly militant reflection on housing and social conditions. Its graphic language, sans-serif lettering, photomontage, cropping and colored overprinting, functioned as critique in itself—for example, the first cover opposed the luminous industrial modernity of the Van Nelle factory to a dark background of Spanish historicist architecture.
The publication ended abruptly with issue 25 (June 1937), without any editorial announcing its closure or suggesting it would be the final instalment, a silence consistent with the issue’s own contents, which remain confined to housing and environmental conditions in Barcelona’s Districte V. This silence is particularly conspicuous given the historical moment: published only weeks after the bombing of Guernica (26 April 1937) and the opening of the Paris International Exposition (25 May 1937), the issue contains no reference to either episode, despite the central role of Josep Lluís Sert as architect of the Spanish Republic Pavilion. The absence of any mention of these events suggests that A.C. was not conceived as a chronicle of current affairs but as a vehicle for a long-term architectural and urban program. Rather than concluding through editorial choice, the magazine was interrupted by the rapidly deteriorating circumstances of the Civil War, which progressively dispersed the GATEPAC network and redirected its members’ energies towards the Republican war effort. The death of Josep Torres Clavé at the Lérida front on 12 January 1939 and Sert’s exile in Paris and later the United States would subsequently mark the definitive end of the cultural and professional milieu from which the journal had emerged.