Bednark Studio is Reimagining the Every Day Through Experiential Design
Conflict and reconciliation between lovers on the L train. Music from an ongoing bachata class echoed down the block. Decade-long friends smoking cigarettes outside of their usual haunt. The true mysticism of New York City lies not in those grandiose depictions of film and television but in everyday experiences; its lore is localized in shared spaces and contained in fleeting interactions.
Bednark Studio, a New York City-based technical design firm, seeks to redefine our experience of the day-to-day through meaningful spatial intervention and thoughtfully constructed environments. Its inception can be traced to its founder, Michael Bednark’s pursuits in film—a no-room-for-failure industry in which outlandish artistic concepts must be realized and the essence of an idea's original intent preserved. Born from these same motivations, his namesake studio aspires to honor the humanity of design by elevating the role of the storyteller and transforming concepts once confined to the imagination into a tangible nexus of experience and connection.
This innovation in approach to execution proves essential to making an impact in today’s experiential landscape, which feels more saturated than ever given the constraints of time, space, and budget. Indeed, the pressures of these ephemeral spaces—be they retail activations or artistic engagements—seem to be producing a certain predictability of concept and experience. Repetition is reflected in the same mirrored surfaces, in spaces punctuated by sparsely arranged mid-century style furniture and fixtures, and in rooms adhering to identical spatial organization.
Bednark CEO Raphael Sorcio concedes that there are only so many viable permutations of product display and ever more limited ways in which movement can flow in a space. Where the firm departs from the norm, then, is in its proclivity for conceptual risk-taking—whether it is through the experimentation in texture, lighting, the materiality of an environment, or the limitless combinations that any of the aforementioned offer.
Such audacity of design endows the studio with the unique ability to evade visual monotony while still capturing a multitude of perspectives communicating universally accessible narratives through its varied techniques. It is a testament to the entity’s unwavering commitment to honoring “good design,” its unwillingness to compromise on artistic details, and its refusal to think in singular terms when bringing concepts to life.
What’s more is that Sorcio sees the concrete jungle as the “ideal context in which to break away from the status quo.” In both concept and design, Bednark Studios gleans inspiration from the diversity of the iconic metropolis’ residents, who are singular in both personal nature and professional pursuit to break through the boundaries of tradition. This methodology is apparent in each of the visionary’s endeavors inspired environments that feel like a playful interjection into the urban quotidian.
See a perpetual light emanating from a bus stop situated outside of the Standard Highline creates both a temporally charged and sculptural moment that invites around-the-clock engagement. A focal point of Highsnobiety’s Not in New York flagship, the structure evokes the spirit of classic New York. Designed to give the appearance of being cast in concrete, it projects the illusion of permanence and disguises the true transience of its tenure outside of the famed hotel.
Elsewhere, a whimsical treehouse erupts from a vast landscape of concrete monoliths, the juxtaposition of limitless imaginative potential against the restrictions of urbanity. An intimate invitation into the mind of Virgil Abloh and the inspiration behind his final collection for Louis Vuitton, the fantastical structure injects a certain childlike wonder into the otherwise industrial surroundings of the Brooklyn Navy Yard. The scale of the sculpture itself seems unimaginable, endowing the surrounding spatial elements of the exhibit with surrealist qualities.
Meanwhile, across the bridge, a dark haze is cast across an expansive fashion runway punctuated by the glow that exudes from a network of city street lights. Illuminating the purposeful walks of the high fashion pedestrian in Hermes’ FW24 presentation, the luminosity of red, yellow, and green encapsulates the energy and vibrancy of the surrounding city streets.
Those experiences of Bednark Studio’s creation are compelling not only in their feats of technicality, but in the same way that all disruptive art forces us to negotiate our relationship to the piece itself, to each other, and to ourselves. Bednark refutes the impulse to operate within the named conventions of physical space by recontextualizing objects and redefining ecosystems that serve a traditionally functional role.
The ultimate aspiration of design is to serve as that invisible hand which guides our lived experiences of the physical world; by blurring the line between real and imagined spaces, Bednark’s creative conceptions effectively shape moment, memory, and meaning for all of those who pass through.
Learn more about the disruptive design house here.
