Young Projects, a multidisciplinary design firm based in Brooklyn, is the winner of this year's annual Times Square Valentine Heart Design. Over the last six years, the Times Square Alliance has invited architecture and design firms to submit proposals for a romantic public art installation celebrating Valentine's Day in Times Square.
This year's winning design, Match-Maker by Young Projects in collaboration with fabricator Kammetal, will be unveiled in early February, and remain on view through early March. This year's invited completion was a collaboration with Van Alen Institute.
"Match-Maker" will cosmically connect people this Valentine's Day. Guided by their zodiac signs, visitors arrange themselves at twelve points around the heart-shaped sculpture. Peering through colorful, interwoven periscopes provides glimpses of each viewer's four most ideal astrological mates, offering potentially novel connections between lonely souls or settled lovers. The form of the sculpture is elusive, complex and symmetrical, and changes as viewers experience it from different vantage points throughout Times Square. From many points of view it forms a perfect and iconic heart; from other perspectives the sculpture is tangled and perplexing.