Stockholm Tunnelbana

The artist (Ulrik Samuelson) was inspired on the garden itself. First of all, when the station was being built, the exit was planned to be in the middle of the park for which some trees had to be cut down. This led to a public protest, people did not want the trees being cut down. Only one tree had a cut which can actually be seen nowadays, and in the station there is a reference to this, one concrete tree with a chainsaw cut.

Coming to the station, it is designed in the colors green, red and white, the colors of the park. Through the station we can see the greek statues, the god of war, and some faces on the walls as the Makalös Palace, and the faces seen on the parliament too. The archeological excavation has original pieces donated by the museum, on the one side with one statue representing painting, and the other one representing architecture. There are radiation markings on the ceilings, remembering what happened with Chernobyl, and every aspect of life that got aaffected. A small detail is an oil barrel spilling on the floor, which comes from the soviet ship Tsesis that on 1977 spilled 1000 cubic meters of crude on the Swedish shore lines.

Inaugurated on 1975 and designed by Sigvard Olsson, tries to give memory to the most important things of Kungsholmen.
The colour of this station is the same colour as the Atlas mountains in northern Africa and throughout the station you can find fragments of Kungsholmens history almost as if they have slowly been pushed down through the rock to finally be visible here in the caves. You can for example find baskets that symbolized the market what used to be at Kungsholmstorg or birchwood which the artist claims have been left behind from a time of crisis.
One of the tunnels has an ark, which is based on the Castle of Vadstena built by Gustav Vasa, nowadays sunk in water.
The best Easter egg in this station, is a small detail on the ceiling. In the middle arch, two boots can be seen, with a little text saying “boots of happiness are in Hantverkargatan”. Nobody knows what this means. However, just above this point, in google maps you can see that in that street, there is a shoe shop, called Alicante shoes…. And where do Swedish people travel to in summer, searching for happiness? To the Spanish beach!!

The station's theme is the sea and the archipelago.
The splashes on walls and ceilings can with some imagination give associations to the constant foamy water splash on the archipelago rocks. To reinforce the station's theme, a one short wall is a glass stand with a bleaching eek with red sail. The boat was newly manufactured at the station by boat builder Edvin Henriksson to show that the craft is still alive. Opposite one corner is a compass rose and in the other a large anchor - also those for the thoughts to the sea and the archipelago. At the other end of the platform, the grate gates have been given a cross - a red and a yellow, similar to landmarks.

If you walk around the entire station you can follow the development on a bit of beach in five-year intervals (Boxes).

This art piece is called Playtime and as you can see is inspired by computer games from the 70’s and 80’s. Playtime has been here since 2008 and was created to give a little wonder during your commute. In 2008, Lars Arrhenius' "Playtime" came into place. The station's concrete ramps were clad in standard Italian clinker in strong colors. The artist has been inspired by pixelated symbols and computer icons from the early computer games during the 1970s and 1980s in his design of the artwork. He got the idea when he looked at Thorildsplan metro station and the traffic carousel around. Here there are roads in different planes, ramps, elevators, entrances and exits, walkways and stairs. According to the artist, this can be compared to an older computer game. With the symbols, he has created his own game with the same goal as the sources of inspiration: to enjoy the journey and maybe catch some ghost or ufo on the way. The clinker also fits well into a 1950s station. The underground stations on the green line, the so-called bathroom stations, all have the square tile on the walls. Lars Arrhenius often works with various forms of pictograms in a graphically cartoon-like imagery in animations and paintings.
It is curious that even though it looks like Mario Bros, you can’t find any of the characters…

From the beginning, the two artists Anders Åberg and Karl-Olov Björk had thought that the station would be red as the evening sky with a long green spruce forest along the walls as well as some titanium cabinets with different scenes. But when they were done, both they and many of the workers who were building the station thought it looked a bit empty. They therefore improvised various scenes that were painted on the walls. The pictures were about topics that were debated in society at this time: environmental degradation, forest felling, sparsely populated politics and more.

At the short wall is a glass stand where we can admire a large moose, made of wood. Karl-Olov Björk has built the body like a boat collar and to get the leathery skin he has poured sawdust on the body and painted on top. Here the elk is the king of the forest and it also appears in several other pictures around the station.
Around the station there are also some cupboards with different scenes. In a larger cupboard in the middle arch you can see how the cottages and the people are getting closer and closer to the dwelling of power and the White House. In the yellow helicopter, President Nixon flees and at the bottom is written a line by Bob Dylan: "The times they are a changin '" - times are changing.

It is the centre of Stockholm, where most people walk through every day. In this station, there are different levels with three different metro lines, and the one that is the most beautiful here is the blue line, being the original of the station.
It was designed by Olof Ultvedt in a deep blue color trying to sooth people, calming us down. People are using this station to commute, running though our busy day we encounter this station in a deep color, without commercials around.
But there are some markings on the walls, It can be seen that these marks actually change patterns. There are 4 ideas of patterns, from winter tires on the snow, some flowers booming in spring, summer reeds, and autumn leaves.
When going upstairs, there are some markings on the walls like silhouettes. The artist wanted to acknowledge the workers, and wanted to write their names on the walls, but this would actually look like a graveyard! For this reason, we have their silhouettes.

When coming out of the station, try getting out through the Pendeltag stairs, because there is a beautiful tunnel design going out. It can be a bit tricky to find, but totally worth it! There is also more art scattered around in the station.

Here at Stadion the artist wanted to remind us of what is overhead above the subway tunnels. That is why the whole station is painted sky blue and there is a rainbow in the middle. At the exit towards Valhallavägen you can see a big S. This S is painted in yellow, red and blue, the colours of the club Djurgården as Djurgården’s football (soccer) team played their games here until the summer of 2013. The M on the wall next to it represents Musikhögskolan, one of our largest music universities. If you look at the wall between the platforms you can also find the poster for the Olympic Games held in Stockholm at Stadion 1912.

Lennart Mörk's overall design of the Technical University's cave station alludes to the different elements of the earth and to different sciences associated with KTH above earth.
Walls and ceilings have a dark, brown color, similar to the mountain and cave. The station's theme is built around Plato's view of the four elements as well as the ether, which he counted as the fifth element. Each element is represented at the station by a sculpture in the form of a regular polyhedron. A regular polyhedron is a body whose surfaces are the same size and where all side angles are equal. There are only five regular polyhedra. On the floor below each sculpture there is a fold with all sides visible.
In the middle vault hangs the twelve-sided dodecahedron. Here, the 19th century conceptions of the so-called world ether symbolize. The casing represents the idea of the ether that you have had to penetrate to see reality in a new way with the help of Einstein's theory of relativity (Ether).

An Apple hangs in the roof and breaks through the stretch metal. On the glass screen next to it you can read Newton's three laws of motion with ever larger and heavier text, the closer to the floor the text comes.