Heartwalk  has moved to DUMBO and is installed in the Pearl Street Triangle, just next to the Manhattan Bridge Archway, through April 30th.  Big thanks to the Design Trust for Public Space for helping to find new home for Heartwalk and for connecting us to the DUMBO Improvement District and the New York City Department of Transportation, who facilitated the move in early March.  After Heartwalk leaves DUMBO, we have plans to move it to another venue for the summer.  We hope to announce the next location shortly.

As documented in the above time-lapse, the shadow of the Manhattan Bridge creates a spectacular light show on sunny days.

Also, the Heartwalk Instagram aggregator site is still up and running.  Click here to check out the latest pictures (www.heartwalkdumbo.com), and be sure to visit and tag your own photos #Heartwalk.

We were honored to have a visit from Architects Wang Shu and wife/partner Lu Wenyu recently.

Valentine’s Day was pretty intense in Duffy Square this year as tens of thousands of visitors passed through to renew vows, canoodle and visit the “heart” of New York City.

Photo by Keith Sirchio

Couples and families filed in to heartwalk throughout the evening. It really began to function like a photo booth.

In a very unexpected surprise Heartwalk  also became the stage for at least four engagements that evening.

Photo by Keith Sirchio

It was our hope that this heart would be a net that could ensnare the incredible diversity that is Times Square. Witnessing the range of visitors that stopped to have their picture taken that evening was pretty remarkable.

Approximately 500,000 people pass through Times Square each day. Inevitably, many of those people are going to take photographs of their experience and as part of the planning around the Heartwalk project we began to think about how we could crowd-source imagery from photos taken by the general public. We worked with a terrific office called HD MADE to build a Heartwalk photo aggregator that harvests Instagram images at regular intervals throughout the day. HD MADE created a platform that harvests images by predetermined hashtags (#heartwalktsq, #heartwalk) and feeds them to a gallery.

If you visit Heartwalk, Instagram a few pics and hashtag them #heartwalktsq. Check out your photos (and everyone else’s) here: www.heartwalktsq.com

Hopefully over the coming weeks this gallery will grow as the public visits the installation. We’re looking forward to seeing the results of this experiment in social media – somewhere between a photo-booth and a photo-album.

One component of the Design Lab at the New York Hall of Science – the “Dollhouse” – will be used for hand-scale projects, such as making models of buildings and cities. The perimeter of the space is composed of shelving for both display and materials storage. A continuous horizontal surface called the “aggregator” will provide space for kids to display what they have made and to build on the ideas of other participants. In response to the program’s emphasis on craft and making by hand, the structure of the dollhouse will be based on traditional timber construction. For both the walls and ceiling, wood framing will be laid out in a triangulated tessellation pattern and joined with connectors that are integral to the plywood cladding. To allow passers-by to see in, some parts of the perimeter are left open, and some parts of the cladding are perforated. The perforations echo the tessellated geometry of the framing.

The Aggregator

Front View of the Dollhouse

Plan of the Dollhouse

We’re in the throes of assembling the components for the Heartwalk. After removing all the hardware and planing the planks, we’ve been cutting them to size for assembly into the array that will form the inner and outer walls. The structure will be pre-assembled into sections that we will transport and install in Times Square over approximately 12 hours.

A view of the south-side being mocked up.

A view from between the interior and exterior walls.

Note all the holes from where original boardwalk screws were removed.

Over the past week we’ve collected close to 500 salvaged boardwalk boards from four locations (Atlantic City, Sea Girt, Long Beach, Rockaway) along the NY/NJ coasts that were hit by Hurricane Sandy for our Times Square installation, Heartwalk.  Boards are a mix of exotic Ipe, treated Pine and Cedar, and composite decking.  In some locations we’ve picked boards out of piles of debris.  At other locations we were given permission to unscrew boards from sections of boardwalk that were deemed unsafe and would need to be rebuilt.

Once back in our fabrication shop, repurposing begins by removing nails and screws and brushing sand and salt off of the boards.  Splintered sections are cut away and the remaining clean portions are stacked and dried.  A number of the Ipe boards that will be used on the interior of the heart are planed on one side to expose the natural dense reddish grain that is masked by the weathered gray patina.

Simultaneously, we have been developing the design through mockups and lighting studies.  Over the next week, we’ll be fully fabricating Heartwalk at a staging location adjacent to our fabrication shop prior to installing in Times Square on February 10^th.

Last Friday we began the process of collecting salvaged lumber from boardwalks damaged by Hurricane Sandy for our upcoming installation in Times Square - Heartwalk.  The following photos are of the boardwalks in Atlantic City and Sea Girt, NJ.  On Tuesday we’ll be visiting Long Beach, NY.  What we found in the two sites of New Jersy was astonishing.  In Atlantic city the quater-mile section of boardwalk along the Absecon Inlet was almost completely torn from the concrete piers.  In Sea Girt, the mile-long boardwalk will have to be entirely rebuilt.

Over the next couple weeks we’ll re-purpose 300-400 boards from the three sites for the Times Square installation.

One of the few remaining sections of Absecon Inlet boardwalk, Atlantic City.

Splintered section of the Atlantic City boardwalk at Oriental Ave.

Warped and fractured section of Sea Girt boardwalk.

Picking boards from pile of debris in Atlantic City, NJ.

Situ Studio is the winner of this year’s annual Times Square Valentine Heart Design, a collaboration between Times Square Arts, the public art program of the Times Square Alliance, and the Design Trust for Public Space.

Heartwalk will be unveiled on Tuesday, February 12, 2013, and remain on view until March 8, 2013.

Aerial rendering of Heartwalk in Duffy Square.

Rendering looking south from the TKTS pavilion.

Whether it was the radically reconfigured landscapes, the compromised infrastructural networks that tie us all together or the temporary solutions that emerged in the days and weeks that followed, Sandy confronted all New Yorker’s with a transformation of the familiar.  This installation takes inspiration from the collective experience of this event and the love that binds the City’s citizens together on this Valentine’s Day.  Using wooden planks salvaged from the boardwalks of both New York and New Jersey, the installation begins as two ribbons which fluidly lift from the ground to form a heart shaped enclosure in the middle of Duffy Square.  The slatted construction, illuminated from within, provides varied views of the interior as the visitors move around perimeter of the installation.  At the base of the heart, a flattened area allows visitors to enter the installation itself – alone together for a moment at the center of the world’s greatest city.

Recently, we were interviewed to be part of the Studio Space portion of Designer Pages Media by Otto. Otto aims to facilitate a connection between architects and manufacturers through their search platform. Check out their video of our conversation below…

We’re moving into the design development phase for Design Lab, the new exhibition space Situ Studio is designing for the New York Hall of Science. Over the next 7 months we’ll be working with the Museum to finalize the plans for the space and are working towards an opening in June 2014.

Design Lab Model