A theatrical new subway station is gracing the Berlin stage after a dramatic opening Friday.

The new Museumsinsel U-Bahn station is part of an expansion of the U5 that will connect the line into an area of the city called Museum Island.  

Swiss architect Max Dudler is behind the transformation, which was inspired by theater sets built by the great 19th-century German designer Karl Friedrich Schinkel.

The final stage of the €500 million ($590 million) project was unveiled last week following lengthy delays that have set back Dudler since winning the competition for its design in 1998. 

Starry-eyed Berliners can now embark on their journeys underneath a deep blue ceiling vault dotted with over 6,000 points of light that runs almost the entire length of the 180-meter station. A dark-grey main concourse takes riders through a colonnaded hall composed of granite from the Fichtel Mountains to evoke a classical feel. The new station, along with two others, will help close a gap on the U5 that’s existed since 2002, when the original expansion plan was shut down thanks to a citywide financial crisis.

“It's always night in the subway station. And there is something infinite about a starry sky. You don't know where it ends. I wanted to create this feeling of infinity,” Dudler told the German-language news network FAZ online. 

Now, with the expanded service adding the city’s 175th station to the U-Bahn network, Berliners and tourists alike can have easy access to the area between the Alexanderplatz and the Brandenburg Gate. This will aid the nearly 2.5 million annual visitors, who flock to the island every year to see its five museums, including the Neues Museum restored by David Chipperfield in 2009 and the new Humboldt Center, which opened late last year.

The adjacent new Rotes Rathaus and Unter den Linden U-Bahn stations had previously opened in December. Museum Island was added to a list of UNESCO World Heritage Sites in 1999.