Many of us lose our hearts in NYC.
Find yours in Times Square at the annual Valentine Heart exhibit.
2020 is the 12th annual Times Square Valentine Heart Design Competition. This year’s competition was was curated by Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum.
Called Heart Squared, it is being unveiled at 11am on January 30 at Father Duffy Square, between 46th and 47th Streets., where it will remain on view for the entire month of February.
So there’s plenty of opportunity for selfies.
The heart-shaped public art installation shines a light on love in the most famous intersection in the world, also known as the Crossroads of the World.
125 mirrors are tilted in various directions within a steel frame that evokes the outline of an anatomic heart, creating kaleidoscopic images of people, buildings, and brightly-lit billboards.
While the position of each mirror seems random, it’s not.
As viewers move around the structure towards a special marked location, hundreds of reflections coalesce, revealing a collage heart of urban life surrounded by a mirrored sky.
And that picture changes by time of day. It’s especially magical at sunset and later, when billboard lights and screens shift, and as thousands of people pass by.
“Heart Squared represents the collective heart of the city and as such, is an engaging civic statement about celebrating our differences and bringing people together in a fundamentally inclusive way,” saidPhu Hoang and Rachely Rotem, MODU, in a press release.
About the Times Square Valentine Heart Design Competition
This marks the 12th anniversary of the Times Square Valentine Heart Design Competition, an annual process by which Times Square Arts and a curatorial partner invite architecture and design firms to submit proposals for a public art installation celebrating Love in Times Square in February.
Situated in front of the Red Steps each year, the Valentine Heart installation continues Times Square’s commitment to celebrating great design — a commitment exemplified by the Red Steps themselves, which have won multiple architecture awards; by the Times Square Design Lab initiative; and by Times Square’s connection to events like NYCxDESIGN, which has stationed its Design Pavilion on the Broadway Plazas for the past three years.
Other architecture and design firms invited to submit proposals for the 2020 Times Square Valentine Heart Design included: Agency Agency / Tei Carpenter, HOU DE SOUSA, Isometric Studio, Office III, Other Means.
Previously, the Times Square Valentine Heart exhibit, We Were Strangers Too, focused on the immigrants from many lands who have made NYC the greatest city on the planet.
Artist rendering courtesy Times Square Alliance
Evelyn Kanter is a native New Yorker who has written for the NY Times, NY Daily News, NY Post, New York Magazine, and is a former on-air reporter for WCBS Newsradio 88 and WABC-TV Eyewitness News.
Evelyn Kanter also is the author of several NYC and Hudson Valley guidebooks, including my latest, 100 Things to Do in NYC Before You Die.
Purchase autographed copies by emailing evelyn@nyconthecheap.com
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