New York-based architect Candy Chan just launched Project Subway NYC to visualize some of Manhattan’s most complicated subway stations, blueprint style.

Chan says she was inspired by Hong Kong’s subway, which displays platform layout maps in each station. Exits are denoted by letter, and signs point you to individual exits rather than intersections, as they do in New York. In Hong Kong, Chan says, people often make travel plans by saying, for instance, “I’ll meet you at exit A.” (Now imagine telling someone to meet you at an entrance to New York’s Times Square station. Good luck with that.)

The path to Koreatown through 34th Street – Herald Square station.
The path to Koreatown through 34th Street – Herald Square station. - To create her station layout maps, Chan set out with a clipboard, pen, paper, and a camera. Her method was relatively rigorous—counting subway tiles and stairs to estimate distances; using Google and MTA neighborhood maps to determine block lengths; taking pictures and making sketches by hand, then cross-referencing the two. Chan even considered acquiring blueprints from the MTA but ultimately decided against it, sticking to her first-person, camera-based approach. As long as she could connect the dots between different sections of each station, she says, granular accuracy took a backseat to legibility. Chan transferred her preliminary sketches to AutoCAD, printed out the linework, and took it back to the subway to verify the proportions. Then, using a combination of Photoshop, Illustrator, and Rhino, she rendered these drawings in 3D to produce intricate maps of each station’s innards. © Candy Chan