Installation: ‘BIGNYC’

Bjarke Ingels sends America a valentine from Denmark this February, in the form of a 10-foot-tall heart-filled square in New York’s Times Square. Whereas last year, volunteers were invited to hold aloft a metal-and-fabric heart round the clock, this year, the nonprofit New York Times Alliance asks couples to declare their love in front of BIGNYC, made of 400 transparent acrylic tubes and 90 LEDS. When lovebirds touch a sensor in front of the sculpture, the energy from their hands is converted into light. “The heart reflects what Times Square is made of: people and light—the more people, the stronger the light,” Ingels says. The Bjarke Ingels Group collaborated with Brooklyn, N.Y.–based fabrication studio Flatcut to make the heart. On display Feb. 6 to 29. • bigheartnyc.org