Lang\Baumann for ID: There should be little doubt as to whether the slightly menacing panels of slick, black molded polystyrene and electric bulbs constructed by the Swiss duo Lang\Baumann qualify as art or design: They have a title (“Perfect #2”), a curator (Marc-Olivier Wahler at Paris’s Palais de Tokyo), and a privileged role as the functional gatekeepers to a bona-fide art exhibition (“Five Billion Years,” a group show which closed at the end of 2006). 

Still, visitors should be forgiven for wondering how much it would cost to have the dazzling wall treatments installed at home. “We like that very much, it looking like design,” says Daniel Baumann, half of the Burgdorf, Switzerland-based studio, with Sabina Lang. “But there’s a difference between making design, and making something like design. No one actually orders pieces from us. If people are asking themselves, ‘Where is the art in this piece?’ then they’re also thinking about what the function of art is. Can art be something that is used? Can it be a hotel?”

Indeed, one of the duo’s highest-profile projects is their Hotel Everland, a mobile, one-room pod that functions as artistic experimentation and a rentable hotel property, with €220-a-night reservations handled by a local Marriott. Currently installed on the roof of the Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst in Leipzig, Hotel Everland offers concierge service, a stocked mini-bar, and embroidered towels that occupants are invited to “steal”; overnight guests will also enjoy the room’s double windows, though perhaps not the look inside they offer GFZK visitors who venture up to the building’s roof. (After the GFZK show ends in August, the pod will be installed above the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, and the windows will offer a view of the Eiffel Tower.) 

The pod’s sleek design expertly mimics a boutique hotel—a blue mosaic-tile bathroom looks swiped from a Bisazza catalogue—but its creators seem to view the visual aesthetics, however accomplished they are, as a means for asking questions unrelated to interiors. “Normally we don’t make stuff in this real-world context,” says Lang, who mentions a similar project in a Cape Town bar as a fellow exception. “But the theme is still to explore what can art be, both in galleries and in public spaces.”

Invited to contribute to an exhibition, the pair met in 1990 and haven’t worked separately since; their professional entwinement eventually turned personal, and produced a three-year-old daughter. 

It’s easy to imagine the Lang\Baumann household as an always-open laboratory for artistic investigation. “It’s not really a question, where private life starts and the work stops,” Lang says. Baumann continues: “Our daughter’s another point in the system, because she’s not coming out of art,” he says, before modifying his statement. “Of course, her godfather is a curator and her godmother is an artist.” Private or public, it seems that Lang and Baumann couldn’t escape art if they tried.

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