Banou Studio: A Manifesto

Everything we make begins with an encounter.

A person enters a room.
There is an object in it.
The object has been made by someone, from something, somewhere.

These facts are simple. Design often disguises them.

We are interested in making them visible again.

A material carries evidence of the place from which it came. A piece of timber contains climate and time. A sheet made from agricultural waste contains another history: cultivation, consumption, labour, industry, what was wanted and what was left behind.

To work with a material is to enter this history.

We do not choose materials simply because they are beautiful. We ask what their presence means. Where did they come from? Who transformed them? What knowledge was required? What possibilities have we failed to see in them?

The same questions can be asked of objects.

Consider a Hi-Fi speaker.

Convention tells us that it is equipment. It reproduces recorded sound. It is measured by its accuracy and sold according to its performance.

But place a speaker in a room and something else occurs.

Chairs turn towards it. People move closer. Conversation changes. Someone chooses a record. Another person listens. For a few minutes, several lives occupy the same time.

The machine has produced a social space.

This interests us.

Banou Studio works with sound because sound makes relationships perceptible. Between an object and a room. Between material and vibration. Between one listener and another.

We do not believe these relationships should be divided into separate disciplines.

The person designing the speaker cannot ignore the room around it. The person designing the room cannot ignore how people will sit within it. Furniture changes posture. Light changes attention. Material changes sound. Sound changes our perception of all of them.

Together they form an environment.

Our work moves between these scales: an object, a piece of furniture, a room, an installation, an occasion for people to gather.

There is another relationship we return to: that between culture and making.

Culture is frequently added to contemporary design after the object has already been conceived. A pattern is applied. A historical form is quoted. A familiar image establishes provenance.

We are suspicious of this.

A thing can belong to a place without depicting that place.

Its belonging may be found in the material from which it is made, the industries that produced it, the hands that assembled it, the climate it responds to, or the way people gather around it.

These things are less immediately visible than ornament.

They are also more difficult to imitate.

Technology does not need to erase these differences. It can make them more precise.

New methods of engineering and fabrication allow ordinary materials to assume unfamiliar roles. What was previously discarded may become useful. What was structurally impossible may become possible. Old resources enter new systems of production.

We are interested in this moment of change.

Not because the new must replace the old.

Because neither remains quite the same after encountering the other.

This is how we understand progress: not as a movement away from where we come from, but as an expansion of what can be made from it.

And perhaps this is also why we care about listening.

Listening requires attention.

Attention requires time.

To listen is to admit that something outside oneself is worth receiving.

In a culture increasingly organised around speed, distraction and individual consumption, creating a place in which people choose to listen together is a modest act.

But modest acts can change the character of a room.

Banou Studio makes objects and spaces in the hope that people might notice: to notice material, sound, place, and one another.