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Method and corrections

How the corpus is compiled, checked and corrected, what it does not yet know, and the dated list of corrections. The French text is authoritative.

What the corpus contains

1,241 buildings (Brussels 396, Flanders 629, Wallonia 157, Hauts-de-France 59), 829 architects, engineers, sculptors and contractors, 65 biographies and 48 routes, in French, English and Dutch. Each building is linked to a Wikidata item (1,241 of 1,241). The corpus is published under the CC BY 4.0 licence, as pages for readers and as structured data for agents (JSON, GeoJSON, llms.txt, MCP server).

Sources

Each entry is based on a record from an official inventory: the architectural heritage inventory of the Brussels-Capital Region (urban.brussels), the Onroerend Erfgoed inventory (Flanders), the Regional Heritage Inventory (Wallonia), the Mérimée database and the General Inventory of Cultural Heritage (France). The record is cited as the source of each entry. A fact absent from the record is used only if another source cited on the entry attests it; otherwise it is not written.

Selection rule: strict Art Deco

A building enters the corpus only if its record itself describes the building’s Art Deco, if it has a firm construction year and if it survives. Excluded: Art Deco that is only “tinged”, an “influence”, “reminiscences” or a single element (railing, stained glass, door); dating by decade, by third or quarter of a century, “interwar”, or “around” a year without a dated source (permit, land register, date stone); ensembles mixing buildings of different styles; older buildings that only received partial facade decoration. A few entries belong to a related style (Art Deco and modernism, expressionism, regionalism) when the record links them to Art Deco; the style is stated on each entry.

This rule has a cost. The Walloon inventory almost always dates by period, not by year: of the hundred best Walloon records mentioning Art Deco that were not yet in the corpus, none was retained. The rule is an editorial choice, deliberate and signed.

Writing and checking

Entries are written from the records by artificial-intelligence agents (Claude, by Anthropic), then reviewed by a second, independent agent that compares each field with the same record: name, address, coordinates, authors and roles, years, type, style, protection, and the three texts. In October 2026 a third, targeted review covered the whole corpus: facts absent from the record, false friends and mistranslations, unattested first names, misrendered protection statuses, inconsistencies between languages.

Mechanical checks that no reading replaces are added: positions compared with the official geocoder (UrbIS in Brussels, Adresmatch in Flanders, the Base adresse nationale in France), a search for duplicates within 40 metres, uniqueness of Wikidata identifiers, consistency of the data schema.

This checking is done by agents, not by a human specialist: it guarantees sources, not expertise. Selection, rules and corrections are the responsibility of the editor, who answers for them.

Conventions

Contributions to Wikidata

Checking each entry revealed what Wikidata did not know. From the editor’s account, just over a thousand items were created for buildings and nearly a hundred and fifty for architects; more than seven hundred architect attributions and ninety protection statuses were added, each with the official record as reference. These edits are public and dated; the QuickStatements batches are listed below (log kept in French).

Known gaps

Corrections log

Wikidata batches

Citing the corpus

Tribot, Pierre-Jean (2026). Art Déco Belgique — inventory of Art Deco in Belgium and the Hauts-de-France [dataset]. https://art-deco-belgique.be. CC BY 4.0 licence.

Report an error: there is a link on each entry; contact: pjtribot@musicartsnet.eu