Caption: Photo of Arts et Métiers station by Stephen Butterworth. 

This copper-clad, subterranean submarine was designed in 1994 by Belgian comic book artist Francois Schuiten in homage to the French author Jules Verne. The station, named after the museum it serves, was designed to be reminiscent of Verne’s Nautilus, the submarine described in his 1870 science fiction novel Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea. Everything in the station was designed to meet this aesthetic, all the way down to the signage and the garbage cans. Portholes lining the platform display tiny miniatures of the machines that you can see in the museum; inventions that revolutionized the modern world, from planes, satellites and automobiles to the Lumière Brothers’ motion picture camera, and even an early model of the Statue of Liberty.