L'Architecture Vivante was published in Paris from 1923 to 1933 by the Éditions Albert Morancé, under the direction of the architect Jean Badovici. Issued as portfolios of large loose plates with a short section of essays, it presented, in the words of its title page, documents sur l'activité constructive dans tous les pays: documents on building activity in all countries.
Two issues appeared each year, for spring and summer and for autumn and winter. The journal followed the modern movement across Europe, the Soviet Union, the United States and Japan. Whole issues were given to the work of Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret, to the Weissenhof Estate in Stuttgart, to Soviet architecture, to Frank Lloyd Wright, to Tony Garnier and to Erich Mendelsohn, and in 1929 to E.1027, the house by the sea that Eileen Gray built with Badovici at Roquebrune-Cap-Martin. Le Corbusier also wrote for it, as in the essays L'esprit de vérité and Où en est l'architecture ? (1927).
This database holds the complete run of 21 issues, from the 1975 unabridged reprint (Da Capo Press, New York, and Trewin Copplestone, London), with page-aligned transcripts and 473 buildings and projects extracted from the plates.
| Project | Architect(s) | Location | Year |
|---|
A selection of the 473 buildings and projects extracted from the plates; each opens the issue at its page. See all 473 projects in the project directory.
The director and publisher of the journal, as printed on its title pages.
Architect and critic (1893–1956), born in Bucharest and settled in Paris; with Eileen Gray he designed and published the house E.1027 (1929).
Librairie centrale d'art et d'architecture, 30–32 rue de Fleurus, Paris (formerly Maison Morel, founded in 1780).
Selected scholarship on the journal, and the institutional sources from which the database draws its scans and transcripts.
The PDFs come from Archibald, the digital library of the Cité de l'architecture et du patrimoine, Paris, which holds the 1975 reprint of the journal. The text was transcribed and aligned page by page with the PDFs, and the buildings and projects were extracted from the tables of contents and the plate captions.
Issues of L'Architecture Vivante are considered to be in the public domain: under EU law (Directive 2006/116/EC) the journal as a collective work is in the public domain, as more than 70 years have elapsed since its last issue (1933). However, individually authored contributions, and the reproductions in this reprint, may carry separate protection: texts, drawings and photographs by authors who died after 1955 may remain under copyright in the EU. The Architectural Periodicals Database does not assert ownership of the original creative content, only of the database itself. If you are a rights holder and believe your work has been used without appropriate permission, please contact us at info@architecturalperiodicals.com.