Forget Paris or Venice, New York City is the romantic place to be this Valentine’s Day. More specifically, head to Times Square, the very heart of the city, for a truly magical moment courtesy of Israeli-born architect Rachely Rotem.

Rotem’s team at MODU, her Brooklyn-based design studio, collaborated with Eric Forman Studio to create a showstopping installation called Heart Squared, the winner of this year’s Times Square Valentine Heart Design Competition.

The heart-shaped installation is made up of 125 mirrors that create colorful, kaleidoscopic images of their surroundings, lovingly pulling them together and capturing them in a unique, one-of-a-kind moment.

“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,” Rotem and Phu Hoang, her partner at MODU, told Times Square Arts.

As published on the MODU website, “designed to celebrate love and diversity, Heart Squared evokes an abstracted anatomical heart formed by an open steel lattice. A cloud of air, steel, and mirrors, it draws visitors to walk around it and experience an ‘infinite grid’ in its kaleidoscopic reflections.”

“Suspended within this lattice, and angled in various directions, 125 mirrors reflect the surroundings of Times Square – the people, buildings, billboards and even the sky above,” it said.
Rotem and Hoang founded MODU in 2012 and have since won numerous awards for their architectural works. Israeli-born Rotem grew up in Tel Aviv and studied architecture at the Technion before continuing her education at New York’s Columbia University.

One of Rotem and Hoang’s earlier installations, Cloud Seeding, was exhibited at the Design Museum Holon.