Dedicated to love and diversity, the public art installation Heart Squared has just opened to the public. In its 12th edition, the Times Square Valentine Heart Design Competition curated by Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum had selected the winning proposal of MODU, an architecture and design firm based in Brooklyn, and Eric Forman Studio.
Celebrating Love in Times Square through the month of February, Heart Squared is “a cloud of steel and mirrors that interacts with viewers”. Commissioned by Times Square Arts and located in Father Duffy Square on 7th Avenue between 46th and 47th Streets, the urban intervention “is shaped as an abstracted anatomical heart formed from a cubic steel lattice”.
Heart Squared celebrates the essential New York— bringing together people of all backgrounds, ethnicities, orientations, and walks of life. -- Phu Hoang, MODU
The ever-changing installation reflects anyone and everyone who engages with it. The overall design is revealed when passers-by discover the “sweet spot” that exposes a giant pixelated shape. 120 suspended mirrors within the open lattice, reflect an interwoven grid of the urban landscape of people, buildings, and billboards.
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. -- Rachely Rotem, MODU.
Emphasizing the importance of the horizontal Manhattan, the public floor of the city, the designers state that they imagined Heart Squared“as an amplifier of this togetherness”. Eric Forman adds that “Heart Squared is designed as a balancing act between structure and air, buildings and sky, people and city, and movement and slowness.”
We are using the magic of mirrors and light to remix the urban spectacle into something unexpected, to give people a new way to see the city — and each other. -- Eric Forman
- Design: MODU and Eric Forman Studio
- Organizers: Times Square Alliance
- Curator: Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum.
- Structural Engineering: Silman
- Fabricator: New Project
- Sponsors: The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Arts; The Ripple Foundation, Carrie Denning Jackson and Daniel Jackson; the National Endowment for the Arts; and public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.
- In-kind Sponsors: New Project for fabrication; Silman (under Scott Hughes) for structural engineering
