Architectural
Periodicals Database.

Digital reproductions of 20th-century magazines enable today the possibility for new ways of interacting with art and architecture history, through their heritage of printed media. By combining digital humanities and knowledge infrastructure, this project suggests the development of a prototype interface to re-shape our interaction with history based on magazines as an open-access dataset, setting up a pole of interest for education and research.

Before websites and the digital turn of the 21st century, the periodical was the first mass medium to shape architectural production and set the terms of their systematic emergence to the public eye. The novel avant-garde periodicals of the early 20th century, the professional monthly reviews of the midcentury, or the "pop" glossy periodicals of the post-war era have entered the sphere of the public domain. But until now, their open-access availability is sparse, and the possibilities offered by digital technologies are left unexplored.

What narratives of architecture emerge if we look through the lens of magazines' archives?

How can they be incorporated in architectural education? What do they tell us about our own media-dominated world? And what is the future for architecture's heritage of printed media in the digital age?

It leverages open-source tools and interoperable standards to ensure long-term accessibility and compatibility. Through open access, we aspire to remove barriers to entry and reframe magazines not as isolated artefacts but as a cohesive cultural dataset, opening them up to a wider community of researchers, as well as younger generations.

Centralization, in this context, is not about control but about providing clarity and usability in a fragmented archival landscape. The project also explores digital publishing methods — from searchable flipbook viewers to interoperable metadata — to activate the potential of magazines as dynamic, pedagogical, and scholarly tools in a contemporary digital environment.

The long-term goal is to bring historical magazines of the 20th century up to 21st-century standards of GDPR compliance and FAIR principles, in terms both of user experience and privacy, as well as accessibility and reproducibility — towards readers, as well as automatically trained machine models and indexing catalogs.