Cell phones, automatic teller machines and the Internet have incontrovertibly become part of our daily lives, indistinguishable from other components of our habitual everyday activity. Life does not seem to have been fundamentally changed by these hi-tech, information-giving tools of convenience--or has it? Have we, unawares, become accustomed to a new way of living? And how can designers make creative use of these new digital possibilities? This publication of the Fourth International Bauhaus Kolleg--a year-long thematic graduate session run by the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation--offers...

The fifth issue of Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau's new periodical focuses on the role of the tropics as an ideal of modernism. Torsten Blume explores aspects of nudity in modernism, Zvi Efrat writes about Arieh Sharon's 'tropical architecture' in Nigeria, Brenda Danilowitz proves the influence of pre-Colombian art on Anni Alber's work with textiles, Carola Ebert and Stefan Locke offer a cultural history of the bungalow as a global architectural phenomenon, Regina Bittner describes the transcultural exchange between Indian and European modernism and Marion von Osten analyses the insidious propaganda...