Monica Pidgeon died she was 95

Monica Pidgeon, who has died aged 95, was a pivotal figure in the world of postwar modern architecture. She edited the Bloomsbury-based international journal Architectural Design (AD) from 1946 until 1975, publishing and championing the work of major modernist figures such as Le Corbusier, Josep Lluís Sert, Mies van der Rohe, Walter Gropius, Richard Buckminster Fuller and Alison and Peter Smithson.

She was born Monica Lehmann in Chile, the daughter of an anglophile Frenchman and a manse-bred Scotswoman. Her father was the chairman of a copper-mining company and had promised his wife that the children should complete their education in England so, in 1929, the family set sail.

In London, Monica attended St Martins-in-the-Fields school, Dulwich, and then took a two-year course in interior design at the Bartlett School of Architecture at University College London, where her contemporaries included Hugh Casson, Richard Seifert and a young student called Raymond Pidgeon. Monica and Raymond married in 1936, but were divorced 10 years later. They had a daughter, Annabel, and a son, Carl, who later became a distinguished physicist.

Monica joined Architectural Design in 1941 to assist the then editor, Tony Towndrow, and was promoted to editor in 1946, when Towndrow emigrated to Australia. The owners did not like the idea of a female editor and insisted that male architects' names (including Ernö Goldfinger and Denys Lasdun) were placed on the masthead as "consultants" to reassure readers and advertisers. In those early years, Monica attended the founding of the Union International des Architectes (UIA), the first postwar meetings of CIAM (Congrès International d'Architecture Moderne) and was an active member of the MARS (Modern Architectural Research) Group.

In the early 1950s, Theo Crosby became AD's technical editor. While working at the magazine, Crosby curated the influential This Is Tomorrow exhibition at the Whitechapel gallery in 1956, bringing together the work of artists and architects such as Eduardo Paolozzi, Richard Hamilton, Colin St John Wilson and the Smithsons.

Monica was a member of the organising committee of the UIA conference in London in 1961. It was there that she met the US architect and inventor Buckminster Fuller, who launched his World Design Science Decade that year. The WDSD was a far-sighted programme to control the depletion of the world's resources. AD subsequently published many articles on Fuller's work.

The architectural writer Ken Frampton was AD's technical editor from 1962 to 1964 and the historian Robin Middleton succeeded Frampton in 1964.

At the AD editorial office in Blooms- bury Way, all work and meetings were carried out around one large wooden table; visitors, including "star" architects, were offered a three-legged, Jacobsen chair; as they leant forward to show Monica their work they would frequently tip unceremoniously under the table. It was an effective way of cutting the sometimes arrogant contributors down to size.

Monica believed that if a building was no good, it was better not to publish it at all than to write a critical piece. In addition to promoting the work of Fuller, AD in the 1960s was an advocate of the theories of Team Ten, which had replaced CIAM as the voice of radical young architects and urbanists, and in particular the work of Aldo van Eyck and the Smithsons.

Another powerful influence was John Turner, whom Monica met when revisiting South America in 1962. He showed her the barriadas – shanty towns built by the homeless. This convinced Monica that if public housing was ever to blossom its future occupants must be involved in the design process.

Though Monica could frighten strong men and reduce typists to tears, her salient characteristics were warmth and a passion for architecture. She built up a substantial network of international contributors and could find a warm welcome in any major city in the world.

The economic and oil crisis in the early 1970s destroyed advertising revenue and AD's owner, Standard Catalogue Company, threatened to close the magazine. Monica convinced them to keep it running on a "book" economy, covering all costs from copy sales. Costs were cut to the bone and AD became more like the alternative magazines blossoming at the time – cheap web printing and hand-pasted lithography, in stark contrast to earlier years. With Peter Murray as technical editor, its focus moved away from buildings to alternative energy and lifestyles, studying many issues that surfaced in the green movement 30 years later.

Survival was tough and by 1975 Monica had had enough. She finally accepted an invitation from the then president of the Royal Institute of British Architects, Eric Lyons, to edit the RIBA journal and AD was sold.

While working at the RIBA she came across a recording that gave her an idea for her "retirement". On her extensive travels, she had noticed that people longed to meet the personalities behind current thinking in architecture. She started Pidgeon Audio Visual (PAV) with the Radio 3 producer Leonie Cohn and they published slides and tapes of architects and designers talking about their work. When Monica retired in 1979, PAV was launched at the RIBA with speeches by the Smithsons and Sir John Summerson, whose voices had been recorded for posterity. She continued to add to the recordings until her late 80s.

In 2006 work started on the digitisation of the Pidgeon archive, which can now be accessed at www.pidgeondigital.com. The list of contributors includes Serge Chermayeff, Buckminster Fuller, Frank Gehry, Cesar Pelli, Conrad Wachsman, Norman Foster, Cedric Price, Renzo Piano, Richard Rogers, Will Alsop and hundreds of others.

Monica was made an honorary fellow of the RIBA in 1970, of the Architectural Association in 1979, and of the American Institute of Architects, for her work on PAV, in 1987.

She is survived by a son, daughter and four grandchildren, including the actor Rebecca Pidgeon, and five great-grandchildren.

• Monica Pidgeon, architectural editor, born 29 September 1913; died 17 September 2009