Bankston x FOR SCALE: NYCxDesign Week

This May, in partnership with FOR SCALE, the design publication and curatorial platform founded by editor and critic David Michon — Bankston presents A Manifesto on Touch as part of NYCxDesign Week.

Held at colbo on the Lower East Side, the installation brings four of Bankston’s collaborative collections into conversation, inviting visitors not to observe, but to touch.

At the centre of the exhibition is a precise proposition: “that touch is not what the handle begs, it is how it performs”. In a discipline increasingly mediated by the rendered image, interiors curated and distributed before they are ever inhabited, A Manifesto on Touch serves as a refreshing departure from the purely optical.

For Bankston, this is not a new proposition; it is the founding one. Since inception, Bankston’s methodology has been to produce functional objects of exceptional quality through curatorial global collaboration: hardware that earns its place in a space by not only how it performs under the hand, but how it transforms the atmosphere around it, turning the ordinary act of opening a door, or resting a hand on a surface, into something quietly remarkable.

The exhibition gathers the four collections that each embody this conviction: Super Collection by Sans-Arc, Casts by Edition Office, Hemispheres by Civilian and The Streaks by YSG Studio. Together, they are not accessories to architecture; they are punctuation marks within it.

Touch is a sensation, and sensation is information. It is how the body language of décor speaks.

- David Michon, FOR SCALE

FOR SCALE is the design publication and platform founded by David Michon, whose writing on architecture, interiors, and material culture has established him as one of the more incisive voices in contemporary design criticism.

At its core, FOR SCALE operates from a belief that design deserves to be taken seriously, interrogated, contextualised, and communicated with precision and wit.

Bankston x FOR SCALE operates with the conviction that the objects we choose to surround ourselves with; the things worthy of our touch, our fingers, our grip, are among the most consequential design decisions we make. In Michon’s framing, a handle is not merely an object but an action: an assertion, or a gesture, but always action.

Bankston’s presence in New York was established in 2024 with the US launch of Hemispheres, the collection envisioned in collaboration with Brooklyn-based studio Civilian, marked at Galerie Was in SoHo.

The occasion drew architects, design professionals, and editorial voices from Architectural Digest and ELLE Décor, a prelude to a deeper engagement with the American design community that this exhibition serves as the next chapter of.

NYCxDESIGN, the city’s flagship design festival drawing the international architecture and interiors community each May, is where that conversation continues. This year’s exhibition and partnership with FOR SCALE marks a progression: one that moves beyond the singular collection launch and into something more immersive, staging four of Bankston’s collaborative collections together as a unified proposition about the role of touch in considered design.

A Manifesto on Touch opens with a private launch at colbo on the Lower East Side, 13 May, 5-8pm.

Open by appointment: 14-17 May, 11am-3pm.

The Partnership Continues at 3 Days of Design, Copenhagen.

Bankston x FOR SCALE continues the narrative this June at 3 Days of Design in Copenhagen, where the partnership presents How to Handle, a new installation honouring the decisive action of a handle, and the next chapter in an ongoing conversation about what it means to truly touch the spaces we inhabit.