From New York to Copenhagen, Bankston makes a case for hardware as a design decision and takes its collaborative hardware collections to two of the world’s most anticipated design festivals.
In partnership with Bankston
Bankston has spent the better part of four decades refining a simple idea: that architectural hardware is not a finishing detail, but a design decision. This year, that philosophy takes the Australian-born brand to two of the world’s most anticipated design festivals: NYCxDesign in New York and 3daysofdesign in Copenhagen.
In New York, the collaboration took shape as A Manifesto on Touch, an immersive exhibition reframing the role of touch, staged at Colbo on the Lower East Side during NYCxDesign Week. At its heart, the exhibition brought together Bankston’s collaborative architectural hardware collections by Sans-Arc, Edition Office, Civilian, and YSG Studio, presenting each as a deliberate design object in its own right rather than a functional afterthought. Together, the four collections speak to the breadth of Bankston’s collaborative practice; each forming a creative partnership that pushes materiality, form, and production in a different direction, and crafted to be experienced in person rather than on screen.
FOR SCALE, the platform founded by critic and editor David Michon brought an additional editorial lens to the exhibition, whose platform has established itself as one of the more discerning voices in design criticism, and his framing of touch as both sensory experience and design language gave the New York presentation a clear point of view—one that resonated well beyond the hardware category.
The partnership continued in Copenhagen this June, where Bankston presents How to Handle at 3daysofdesign, located at Gammel Mønt 2 in the Kongens Nytorv district. The installation builds on the foundation laid in New York and explores what it means to design objects intended to be touched, held, and returned to every day, and why that question deserves more considered attention than the industry has traditionally given it.
