Times Square Arts is pleased to present Pernilla Ohrstedt Studio's Love Ever After as the winner of the 17th annual Love & Design Competition, on display from February 4 – March 4, 2025 with the support of curatorial partner The World Around and collaborator Billion Oyster Project.

Love Ever After is designed to create beauty through simplicity, where reuse, regrowth, and love for the environment and community are an integral part of its story. The project assembles metal mesh used for oyster reef cages to create a three-dimensional grid revealing geometries of a heart. The three-dimensional heart flickers and shifts color and shape as the angle of its perception changes, creating a tactile and human-scale experience in contrast to the high-tech screens for which Times Square is famous.

Accompanying the installation will be an additional oyster cage filled with shells, symbolizing the future of Love Ever After: after February, the pieces of the heart will become oyster reef cages placed around New York City's shoreline, monitored by hundreds of volunteers as part of Billion Oyster Project's mission to restore one billion oysters back to New York Harbor by 2035.

For seventeen years, Times Square Arts has hosted the Love & Design competition to celebrate the work of innovative, emerging architecture and design firms, and speak to themes of love during the month of February in Times Square. The finalists for this year’s competition included: Atelier Masomi, Jerome Haferd, Space Caviar, and Studio Galeon.

The 2025 Love & Design Competition marks a significant milestone as the first-ever commission for The World Around, a nonprofit organization dedicated to making the best ideas in architecture and design accessible to all with a focus on social and ecological justice. The World Around sought installations that not only examined the lifecycle of materials used in architecture but also required each component to be recyclable, reusable, and to serve as a space for gathering and celebration. This approach emphasizes how creative design can foster principles that transcend immediate experiences and contribute to a more equitable and sustainable future.

2025 LOVE & DESIGN COMPETITION JURORS:

Vishaan Chakrabarti, Founder and Creative Director, PAU
Carson Chan, Director of Emilio Ambasz Institute for the Joint Study of the Built and the Natural Environment, MoMA
Wendy Feuer, Former Assistant Commissioner Urban Design + Art + Wayfinding, NYC DOT
Kendal Henry, Assistant Commissioner, Public Art, NYC Department of Cultural Affairs
Angelik Vizcarrondo-Laboy, Director, NYC DOT Art
Jing Liu, Founding Partner, SO – IL
Elizabeth Masella, Senior Public Art Coordinator, NYC Parks

2025 LOVE & DESIGN FINALISTS:

Jerome Haferd: Come Together — Come Together is an interactive installation that offers a space for healing and unity. Woven together in the shape of a broken heart, and crafted from printed, 100% recyclable aluminum sheeting that reflects histories, every day portraits, and words of joy and reconciliation, the structure invites guests to reflect on the many fractures that define our time: political unrest, socio-cultural divides, economic disparities, and the looming threat of climate change.

Space Caviar: The Forest of Love — This work reinterprets Times Square’s most distinctive medium—the video wall—using a new generation of flexible, transparent LED screens applied to glass to create an immersive and responsive forest of love and light. Inspired by the immersive simplicity of Lina Bo Bardi’s seminal installation, the work senses and reacts to people’s presence. Each wall of light grows a plant until human presence is detected all around, causing the plants to explode into a cascade of animated hearts symbolizing love and togetherness.

Studio Galeon: LOCK IT — LOCK IT is an interactive, heart-shaped installation that invites the public to deposit locks of love onto the walls of the sculpture. The installation will be weighed at the end of the month to determine how heavy love is in New York.

ABOUT PERNILLA OHRSTEDT
Pernilla Ohrstedt is a Swedish architect and designer, and the founder of Pernilla Ohrstedt Studio based in New York City. She has an international reputation for realizing innovative projects that span the disciplines of architecture, design, art, and fashion. Key to her practice is creating striking projects with minimal means - through reuse and unexpected material choices and by bringing together visionary teams of forward-thinking clients, community initiatives and exceptional designers and fabricators. Her projects range from buildings, art installations, museum exhibitions, interiors, set design and furniture.

ABOUT THE WORLD AROUND
The World Around is a nonprofit dedicated to making the most innovative ideas in architecture and design accessible to all. Through our critically acclaimed public programs and events, we present ground-breaking contemporary architecture and design, focusing on interdisciplinary, forward-thinking solutions and climate justice. Our archive, featuring commissioned films, talks, and presentations from the world’s leading thinkers and creators, is freely available here and on our YouTube channel. With a strong commitment to addressing the most pressing issue of our time—climate change—The World Around proudly hosts the Young Climate Prize, an award and mentorship program that supports talented designers under 25.

ABOUT BILLION OYSTER PROJECT
Billion Oyster Project is a nonprofit organization on a mission to restore oyster reefs to the New York Harbor through public education initiatives. They envision a future in which the New York Harbor is a world-class public blue space — well used and well cared for by New Yorkers with an effort to engage 1 million people to restore 1 billion oysters by 2035.