Peering down a long, dark, empty tunnel from a subway platform while waiting for the train can be agonizing—especially when you’re stuck underground in a drab, dreary station. But the best metro stations not only provide a means to get to your final destination; they transport you to another world through hypnotizing design or beautiful art.  For this week’s roundup, we scoured the web for the sleekest, best-designed, and sometimes bizarre subway stations—and with over 160 metro systems in the world, there were plenty to choose from. Click through to see our 12 favorites! 

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Coming soon(ish) to New York, the “East Side Access”! Set to open in 2019, the $7 billion project is one the greatest infrastructural works currently underway in urban America. Every day for nearly seven years now, giant machines and teams of workers buried deep in the ground excavate tunnels through Manhattan’s bedrock core. These tunnels will house the future trains that will traverse the length of the new Long Island Railroad (LIRR) line, connecting Sunnyside, Queens, to Grand Central Terminal. At peak times, the line will route 24 trains per hour and ferry 162,000 trips in both directions.

At present, 5.6 miles of tunnel have already been dug. The MTA recently posted images of the construction progress, which finds workers toiling away in a giant crater beneath Grand Central. This cavernous space will be home to a large platform that will terminate the line. Click through for all the photos!

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Product: Made of matte stainless steel, the NYC Metro Cuff features black embossed lines of the streets, and numbers of the famed New York City subway system. Who needs a subway map when you can sport this stylish bracelet highlighting the routes of those underground tunnels? Sized at 2” wide and a 2.5” diameter, this bracelet is the perfect accessory for tourists and natives alike!

Created by: Design Hype

Retail price: $37

Click through to learn how to win!

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Public transportation is rarely described as decadent, even though it is a luxury enjoyed by most city dwellers. Urban environments lend themselves to commuter trains and bus routes, helping millions of people arrive at their destination, albeit not always on time. Unfortunately, between over-crowded trains and delayed schedules, urban commuters can sometimes forget that public transportation is a treat. Parisian city officials have recently transformed a train on the main rapid transit system to resemble the Palace of Versailles, creating potentially the most luxurious and ostentatious train commute imaginable. Read more!

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Audi of America and Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation (GSAPP) have teamed up for an awesome exhibition called “Experiments in Motion.” The show, curated by Christopher Barley and Troy Conrad Therrien, is exhibited next to the Low Line underground park model in an Essex Street warehouse, further exploring the future of mobility, urban space, and transportation within (and below) the city. Read More.

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This past January, after 23 years of construction, Kazakhstan opened the world’s ‘youngest’ subway system to much acclaim, its mix of erstwhile period decor and high-tech gadgetry provoking much internet chatter. While that subway favored opulent surface treatments and smooth vaulted spaces, Stockholm’s underground transit (the Tunnelbana) opts for a more “textured” environment, with rock-hewn arches and ceilings that remind the commuter that they are descending into the depths of the earth.

These “cave stations”–located on the red and blue lines–are part of the metro’s 90-plus stations embellished with art, which are collected in a vast corridor of what is called the world’s longest art gallery. Frescoes, sculptures, and installations are applied or embedded directly onto the bedrock, itself stained with a palette of bright and garish colors that present a totalizing context in which the individual works are inserted. Continue.

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As a Queens commuter, I am one of many New Yorkers who consider my weekend plans royally botched by the construction-related shutdowns on the 7 train. But sometimes all it takes to shrug it off (if just for a moment) are photos of what is actually going on beneath our feet as we mumble and grumble or, in my case, blog about New York’s public transportation woes. Spotted on Gothamist this morning were snapshots of Manhattan’s bedrock, bored through by the tunnel that will eventually extend the 7 line to the island’s oft-neglected West Side. Click to see more.

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Animals on the Underground is an on-going project that casts the London Underground as a wild menagerie of elusive animals, who disappear in and out the thicket of abstract lines which comprise the map of the Tube. The project began in 1988, when the first animal, the elephant, was spotted. Since then a vast array of critters, both wild and domesticated, has been added to the roster of subterranean animals, from playful dogs and soaring pigeons to strutting baby rhinos and quiescent sperm whales. Their form and features are determined by the strokes and folds of the map’s meandering beveled-edge lines, with the creatures sometimes fitting snugly within the Underground’s negative spaces but more frequently extending across the city’s skewed geography to encompass a whole series of train lines. New animals are constantly revealing themselves, so one must be always on the lookout. Click through to see more.

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In the 19^th century, the concept of an underground tube train sustained itself largely in the fanciful transcripts of science fiction novels. Numerous written fantasies of subterranean transit systems stemmed from the experiments of inventors like Alfred Ely Beach, who demonstrated his newly developed pneumatic transit system to the awe of men in top hats and ladies in corsets.

What was then a spectacular dream has since become grounded in reality, perhaps painfully so when you take a look at some of the world’s earliest subway systems, now visibly worn with age. But just last month, Kazakhstan became home to the newest subway system in the world, and photos of the transit system 23 years in the making show that Sacha Baron Cohen’s comedic portrayal of the country could not be further from the truth. More after the jump.

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Spotted today on BLDGBLOG‘s Instagram page is a faux-brownstone in Brooklyn Heights that houses a secret subway exit. The Potemkinesque structure blends in nearly seamlessly with its brick-clad Neo-Georgian neighbors on 58 Joralemon Street, save for its blacked-out windows that mask the emergency stairway and ventilation shafts within. Peering through the keyhole, however, reveals the house’s secret. The emergency exit is just one of many ascending from the train lines passing under the East River to Brooklyn and Brooklyn, says the Brooklyn Eagle. Here, many lines meet before spreading out over the burrough, a spatially confined condition which necessitates numerous points of egress in the event of an emergency. Although the house’s true function isn’t well known outside the neighborhood, the MTA has increased security of the decoy structure for fear that terrorists would force their way in and have access to subway tunnels and ventilation systems. File this under all of the city’s (and BLDGBLOG’s other well-documented) gutterspaces!

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