Bauhaus Issue 5: Tropics

The first issue of the Bauhaus Magazine was published in December 1926 to coincide with the opening of the Bauhaus building in Dessau. Every three months, it reported on events in Dessau and important modern design trends. Bauhaus founders and professors Walter Gropius, László Moholy-Nagy, Ernst Kallai and Hannes Meyer contributed to the magazine as editors. The authors included Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, Marcel Breuer, Ludwig Hilberseimer and many others. The last issue was published in 1931.

80 years after the discontinuation of this periodical, the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation began publishing a new magazine under the old name to cultivate the legacy of the historic Bauhaus and, “given the ideas and approaches of the historic Bauhaus, to address issues of design in the present-day environment” (the Foundation’s statute).

First published in 2013, this fifth new issue is dedicated to the places of longing of the European Modernist avant-garde: Latin America, Africa and Asia. Vanishing point and source of inspiration, area of conversion and hideaway: the exotic tropics were not without influence on European Modernism and thus, also on Bauhaus.