Times Square Arts' 2025 Love & Design Award Winner

Dates: February 4 – March 4, 2025

Location: Duffy Square, New York City

In 2025, Times Square Arts invited The World Around to serve as curatorial partner for the 17th edition of the annual Love & Design Competition, marking the organization’s first public architectural commission. The winning project, Love Ever After by Pernilla Ohrstedt Studio, was presented in Times Square from February 4 to March 4, 2025, in collaboration with Billion Oyster Project.

Developed in response to The World Around’s curatorial brief, Love Ever After explored how architecture can engage with material lifecycle and environmental repair. The work bridged the symbolic and the infrastructural—transforming a gesture of love into a tangible act of ecological restoration.

Constructed from over 40 recycled oyster cages, the sculpture formed a flickering, three-dimensional heart whose shape and color shifted as viewers moved around it. Positioned amid Times Square’s high-resolution LED displays, the installation offered a more intimate, tactile counterpoint to its surroundings. An additional cage filled with oyster shells stood beside the structure, illustrating the project’s long-term ecological purpose.

At the end of its display period, the installation was disassembled and repurposed: each cage became an Oyster Research Cage for use in Billion Oyster Project’s efforts to restore oyster reefs across New York Harbor.