America’s most famous architect trained his way to greatness in Chicago, and made his mark across the Midwest (and the world), expressing a special love for this city along the way. Inspired by his legacy, British cartographer Max roberts challenged himself to illustrate the routes of the Windy City’s ‘L’ system in the style of Wright.

Borrowing from FLW’s Arts and Crafts typography and abstract stained-glass works, he began drawing out the lines and curves of this urban railway network. At the same time, he also took cues from the CTA’s own color-based approach and geometric simplification. Together, these integrated approaches create a system of colors and symbols that is both legible but also aesthetically inspired.

And the results resonate — for anyone who already associates Chicago with the Robie House and other famous Wright creations, these new diagrams seem like a natural extension of his work, and something you might well found hung inside a Usonian house. While Wright favored cars as modes of transportation (during the automobile boom years of the early 20th century, one might also hope he would appreciate the role of public transit with the benefit of hindsight.

The Washington Metro Transit Authority has quietly rolled out a simple but ingenious wayfinding solution: colored escalator railings to guide passengers to their trains. Graphic designer Jen Scharl spotted the new colored rails Fort Totten. There’s no word yet on other stations — for now this is a test, but it is relatively cost-neutral so it might also be ohe beginning of a new WMATA design strategy. The ones so far deployed appear robust — the colors are embedded, not just painted on.

Of course, using colors, symbols and numbers to guide people through stations is nothing new, but anyone who has rushed between levels to transfer trains knows that these aren’t always easy to spot. Plus, color systems are helpful to people who can’t read the text signage for whateve reasons.

Sometimes, finding a sign takes a few seconds, leaving one looking around at the top (or bottom) of an escalator — now, transit users can simply follow the colors. Colorblind passengers will, of course, still have to rely on conventional signage, but perhaps there is a future iteration of this strategy (yet to be designed or deployed) involving symbols as well as colors.

Systems that have been in place for a long time often get overlooked when it comes to wayfinding innovations — aside from periodic guerrilla interventions, locals know what to do and expect others to figure it out on the fly, so it’s nice to see a proactive new solution playing out in an old context.

NYC subways are strange, dark and oft-overcrowded places where many people retreat into themselves and avoiding engagement, at least until these unusual (and invisible) creatures come along.

Artist Ben Rubin uses candid everyday photos of passengers as a canvass for an exotic cast of fictional characters that seem right at home in the public transit system of America’s largest city. His work is complex and detailed, but all rendered on a portable iPad device using the Procreate app.

One could easily imagine that the off-putting noises and smells found on subway trains would be tied to such a strange set of monsters and aliens.

In some cases, they seem to intrude on those seated next to them. In others, they unobtrusively wait in stations for a ride or look at maps, apparently puzzled about getting from Manhattan to Brooklyn.

For the artist, these works started as a way to pass the time on the commute but have become a method of engaging and layering ideas onto photographs outside of the subway as well.

Passengers engrossed in a book, listening to a podcast or zoned into a mobile phone game may not notice them, but these Subway Doodle creatures are there, at least in one man’s imagination. One has to wonder: if any of these really appeared, would the zombie humans around them even notice?

In the early 2000s, the city of Glasgow, Scotland, changed over to blue street lighting in an effort to improve the appearance of the city, but areas with the newly blue lights saw an unexpected and disproportionate decrease in crime.

No one could say for sure whether there was a causal correlation, but half a world away another city followed suit – Nara, Japan, experimentally began turning their street lamps blue. They also saw a decrease in crime.

In  the years that followed, similar deployments were tested, including the addition of over 150 blue lights to an expressway near Tokyo, aimed at reducing accidents.

The Keihin Electric Express Railway Co. even changed the color of eight lights on the ends of platforms at Gumyoji Station in Yokohama, Japan, to curb track-jumping suicides. A subsequent report showed that in the years following, the station saw no suicide attempts (after previously being the site of multiple suicides per year).

There are a number of theories about why the blue light could be causing a decrease in criminal behavior.

Some argue the association of blue with police presence, except: Japanese police use mostly red lights.

Another theory posits that blue light has a calming effect, feeling more pleasant than orange or red. Indeed, studies have shown that blue lights (associated with calm waters and open skies) can reduce stress responses in fish and be used to treat SAD (Seasonal Affective Disorder) in humans.

Of course, it is also possible that the new colored lights are simply different and unfamiliar enough to cause people to feel awkward engaging in illicit or dangerous behavior where they are present. And if that is the case, changing all the public lights in the world to blue might be at best temporary fix, working until people get used to the new blue lighting. Experts have warned not to read too much into the effect, regardless, since the causal mechanism or connection has not yet been definitively determined.

Fenced off or set back from streets and sidewalks and often raised on platforms as well, civic monuments are oddly ideal candidates for concealing a peculiar secondary function: the ventilation of subterranean spaces, from sewage systems to subway tunnels.

In Sydney, Australia, the Hyde Park Obelisk was built precisely for this purpose back in 1857. Modeled on Cleopatra’s Needle located on the banks of London’s River Thames, the 60-foot-tall tower was designed to allow noxious gases to escape upward from the sewers below. Today, the monument remains in place, but vents the city’s somewhat-less-smelly stormwater system instead.

Meanwhile, in Nuremberg, Germany, a controversial set of statues depicting the trials of married life was commissioned specifically to disguise the subway exhaust port located on the site.

The Ehekarussell (roughly translated: marriage-go-round) is critiqued not because of noxious fumes, but for featuring a sequence of scenes through its statuary: a young happy couple turning older and angrier before one spouse slays the other.

Another approach that appears in many cities is more architectural, though no less monumental, using anything from small fake shell houses to huge multistory buildings as giant exhaust conduits.

In Burnaby, British Columbia, a boxy little house serves both to vent subway fumes but also acts as a mid-tunnel escape route for emergencies. Many of these structures not only act as exhaust pipes, but also contain bacterium-based odour removal plants so as to spew somewhat less obnoxious gasses.

The Callahan Tunnel ventilation building in Boston is a relatively less-camouflaged and more-imposing affair built of bricks with vents where one would ordinarily expect to see windows. Many other American cities have similarly larger exhaust buildings, including New York City, where they vent infrastructure including the Holland Tunnel.