Like the chambers of a seashell eroded over time by sand and water, the white hollows of this subterranean museum offer a series of organically shaped spaces tucked beneath the dunes. The UCCA Dune Museum by OPEN Architecture draws inspiration from both children digging in the sand at the beach and the caves that housed humanity’s earliest artworks to create an intriguing complex that interacts with the natural setting.

Daringly set back just a few meters from the water, the art museum along the coast of northern China’s Bohai Bay aims to be “a return to primal and timeless forms of space.” While some might see the development of such a structure in a sensitive natural area as an intrusion, the architects say they chose this location specifically because the presence of the museum will prevent the dunes from being leveled to make way for ocean-view real estate developments, which has already happened along much of the shore.

“A series of cell-like contiguous spaces accommodate the Dune Art Museum’s rich and varied programs, which include differently-sized galleries and a cafe,” the architects explain. “After passing through a long, dark tunnel and a small reception area, the space suddenly opens up as visitors enter the largest multifunctional gallery. There, a beam of daylight from the skylight above silently yet powerfully fills the space.”

The sea, sand and sky join together with the sinuous curves of the building and its ovoid openings to interplay with the artwork on display inside, resulting in a singular experience that simply can’t be recreated when the art travels to different museums. Even varying weather conditions and times of day, with their varying levels and angles of light, alter the visitor’s perception of the art and how it feels in the space.

Walking through the museum’s interiors can feel like navigating a secret network of underground tunnels, and then the contrast of dark and light, under and over, interior and exterior is revealed at the top of a spiral staircase that opens up to the sky. In the near future, a companion museum called the Sea Art Museum will rise from the water itself, visible from the dunes.

Composed of dozens of school buses surrounded with concrete, there may not be room for two of every Earthly animal in this “Ark Two” but there is space for around 500 humans (kids and adults) to cohabitate through a moderate apocalypse.

Located in Horning’s Mills (in case you need to get there in an emergency) on the edge of Toronto, Canada, this remarkable shelter features 10,000 feet of subterranean space. The resulting mega-structure is the largest known private fallout shelter on the North American continent.

Bruce and Jean Beach, a local couple, live on adjacent land and built their underground bunker to last, encasing a series of interconnected buses in solid concrete. As it turns out: a derelict bus is cheap, costing just a few hundred dollars, but its reinforced steel frame makes it a strong candidate to be used for a mold. The buses are carefully aligned to create sequential spaces serving different key functions.

And it wasn’t just built for the pair of them: it is equipped with a well and plumbing, kitchen and laundry areas, even spaces dedicated for doctors and daycare centers (complete with emergency and surgery rooms). The couple constructed the place decades ago, not so much as a space for immediate survival but an outpost from which the world could be built in a post-nuclear age.

The complex doesn’t have a permit, which has landed its builders in court on more than one occasion, but officials seem largely content to let them be at this point. Meanwhile, Cold War or not, the dedicated couple (now well into their 80s) continue to build up supplies and prepare the space for uncertain futures. It may yet pay off.

Manually chipping away at rock for hours, two cave explorers have discovered a massive, previously unknown system of prehistoric caves beneath the streets of Montreal. Estimated to be around 15,000 years old, the Ice Age cave network was found about 30 feet beneath the city’s Pie-XII Park adjacent to the St. Léonard cave already popular with residents and visitors. These shafts tunnel almost 700 feet into the earth – most of their depths filled with water, and thus, pretty hard to fully explore.

Cavers Daniel Caron and Luc Le Blanc say they’ve suspected the existence of these caves since 2014, and spent much of 2017 exploring St. Léonard, which is already mapped, to find potential openings. They came across a narrow opening in the rock face that looked promising, but it was too small to enter, so they stuck a camera inside and took some photos of the chamber on the other side.

The cave explorers used hammers and cordless drills to break the wall down and get inside, finding a cavern with impressively high ceilings that leads to an underground lake. According to the Quebec Speleogical Society, Montreal was built right over this entire system without anyone ever realizing it was there, and Caron and Le Blanc may be the first humans ever to enter the newly-discovered areas.

Many cities all over the world are built right atop underground wonders, from quarries and catacombs to bunkers and smuggling tunnels, but the foundations of many others remain a mystery. Many of us likely walk over secret worlds every day without ever realizing it.

By now, most of us are aware of the abandoned, once-forgotten subway stations and other underground wonders hidden beneath the streets of cities around the world. There are even entire cities beneath cities, like Seattle’s Underground. But what about the more obscure secret spaces right under our noses, that we may pass every day as we go along our routines, never knowing of their existence? You could be walking over a reproduction of the Holy Land, a beautiful Art Deco time capsule, a secret canal or a (literally) underground drag racing strip without having a single clue.

Secret Entrance to the White House

(images via Elliot Carter, Atlas Obscura)

Residents of Washington. D.C. probably walk or drive past this unremarkable alleyway all the time, never paying particular attention to the vehicles that go in or come out. But it’s actually a secret back door to the White House created in the 1940s, and the only reason we know that is through archival newspaper reports from the time, when it was just a matter of relatively yawn-worthy public interest. Perhaps the Secret Service would rather we didn’t know about it, especially since they have installed a bulletproof kiosk into the wall at the entrance for their own staff. The secret route winds around the block, into an IRS building and ultimately empties into a subterranean granite vault built during World War II. No doubt, it’s just one of several such routes, and though it’s low-key public information, you probably don’t want to march right up to the H Street entrance unless you’re looking to get some special Secret Service attention.

Lower-Lower Wacker Drive Under Chicago

(images via: Chicago Reader, digiwonk)

Some people call it the Bat Cave. Others, the Magic Road. You need a special pass card to gain entrance at either end, which makes it feel exclusive to those who zip through its cramped quarters full of concrete pillars. Lower Wacker Drive, which first opened in 1926, is unknown to many Chicagoans, while those who’ve been aware of it for decades roll their eyes at every person who thinks they ‘discovered’ the ‘secret’ passage designed for service vehicles and convention buses. Many skyscrapers along the route open directly to Lower Wacker Drive at basement level for deliveries and garbage trucks. But many a proudly in-the-know Chicago resident may still be unaware that there’s actually a Lower Lower Wacker Drive, built in 1975 for parking and storage. Most people only find out about it when their vehicle is towed to a notoriously hard to access impound lot located on this level. Others who live in the skyscrapers nearby may just wonder if they’re losing their minds when they hear the echoes of the illegal drag racing that goes on along this subterranean route every weekend.

Chattanooga’s Secret Underground City

(images via: picnooga)

There’s a whole other Chattanooga under the current Chattanooga, and nobody knows why. When you descend into the basement levels of many old businesses built in the 19th century, you’ll find windows and doors that lead nowhere, evidence of a lower level that disappeared underground when the city built up its roads between 1875 and 1905. Some people think they did this to avoid flooding from the Tennessee River, while others believe they may have thought it would help stop the spread of infectious diseases like cholera that ravaged residents at the time. It’s hard to really get a sense of the size and scale of this forgotten layer, because it’s almost entirely located on private property. Documentation of construction at the time is almost non-existent, so there’s no digging through archives to solve the mystery. Historians don’t even know where the city got the soil to fill it all in. Naturally, the owners of some of these structures have turned them into tourist attractions with various kinds of tours, and legends of ghosts have proliferated.

A Hidden Stream Beneath Indianapolis

When it’s mentioned in the novel Underground Airlines by Ben Winters, the subterranean river called Pogue’s Run under Indianapolis seems fictional like everything else in the story, which imagines a reality in which slavery in America was never officially abolished. But it’s actually real, running under the city for two and a half miles, a popular destination for urban explorers, who often traverse it by bike. It’s dark and dank, infested with terrifyingly robust rats and gigantic insects. It was directed under the city back when urban streams were essentially open sewers, and mostly hidden under structures like an old parking lot that was removed in the ‘90s, revealing a stretch of it to the public. It lies beneath the only stretch of the city that isn’t perfectly gridded and symmetrical, its own proportions screwing up the plan, and ends where the canal converges with the White River.

Catacombs of Washington

(images via: Mr.TinDC, Lawrence OP, David, Flickr CC)

Of all the many secrets that can be found beneath street level in our nation’s capital, this complex of dim passages might be one of the strangest and most unexpected. Guests who want to explore it enter through a dramatic ‘secret’ gated entrance located near the pulpit of a Franciscan monastery. What they’ll find inside is an almost Disney-like recreation of ‘The Holy Land,’ full of fake graves and reproduction grottoes cast from aggregate cement. The Catacombs of D.C. were created by the monks for North Americans who can’t afford to take a trip overseas. For all the fakery, there’s one grave that’s actually real, containing the skeleton of a seven- or eight-year-old child believed to be a martyr from the second century.

Next Page - Click Below to Read More:
Secret Spaces 12 Architectural Easter Eggs Hidden Under Our Noses

Often mysterious, somber and a little otherworldly, subterranean spaces add a sense of depth (no pun intended) to the art installations and performances held within them. Abandoned subway platforms, tunnels beneath old psychiatric hospitals, cisterns, ice wells, bunkers and even manholes invite us to descend beneath the surface of the earth to experience art on another level.

The Water at The Cisterns by Hiroshi Sambuichi

Damp and dreary yet monumental, with the proportions of a cathedral, this former underground water reservoir in Copenhagen was once an unknown beauty beneath the city, but now functions as ’The Cisterns,’ an unusual art venue. Japanese architect Hiroshi Sambuichi delicately transforms the space while paying respect to all of these qualities with ‘The Water,’ a subterranean landscape installation taking viewers on “a journey through an underground sea of light and darkness.” Natural light, moss and an icy glass cube play with the humidity and moisture levels of the space, making it feel a bit like a secret underground forest.

JFK Figurine Hidden in a Desert Bunker

You’re hiking through the unforgiving plains of the California desert when you come upon a mysterious black hatch. Against your better judgment, you open it and climb down the ladder into a huge metal pipe that appears to be part of some kind of bunker. Inside, what you find is more bizarre than pretty much anything you could have imagined: a statue of John F. Kennedy perched on a stool, casually crossing his legs. Artist Will Boone based his sculpture on a figure from a hobby kit, scaling it up to life-size. To him, the installation “speaks not just to all those things that have been driven underground since the extinguished optimism of the sixties but to those same fears – nuclear attack and the invasion of the other – that have been so vividly resurrected in recent times.”

Secret Sculptural Installations Beneath Paris

An artist who wishes to remain anonymous descended into the many subterranean spaces beneath Paris to illegally install secret art installations, each one often requiring many hours of investigative preparation both to access the space, avoid getting caught and keep the art undisturbed for as long as possible, though he’s gone to jail once or twice. The installations themselves often feel like reverent tributes to the people who occupy liminal spaces in society, evoking camps where homeless people and refugees often live.

Repurposed Oil Tanks at the Tate Modern in London

Repurposed by the firm Herzog & de Meuron, the enormous underground oil tanks of a former power station now act as a dramatic backdrop for performances, interactive art and video installations at London’s Tate Modern. “No longer generating electricity, the Tanks generate ideas, creative energy and new possibilities for artists and audiences,” says the museum. “These raw, industrial, subterranean spaces, each measuring over thirty meters across and seven meters high are the world’s first museum galleries permanently dedicated to exhibiting live art, performance, installation and film.” [Middle photo by Ray Tung/Rex Features.]

D.C.’s Dupont Underground Arts Space

The 75,000-square-foot east platform of Washington D.C.’s subterranean trolley station Dupont Underground is now a visual art and performance space hosting revolving exhibitions as well as performances, permanent murals and other programming. Lying beneath the city’s Dupont Circle about a mile from the White House, this underground space was closed off in 1962 when the city’s streetcar system shut down, and remained empty until the new arts space opened in 2015. Among the installations it has hosted is ‘Whimsical Invasion’ by Hyuntek Yoon and Youngeun Kwun, consisting of over 650,000 plastic balls in nylon netting.

Next Page - Click Below to Read More:
Underground Art 11 Subterranean Galleries Installations Delve Deep