“It was one of the very first projects, when Arts for Transit did a national call for a competition and they got proposals,” explained Sandra Bloodworth, the director of MTA Arts & Design, the successor to Arts for Transit.

It was, like many of the system’s permanent art pieces, commissioned as part of a major station renovation project. When the competition was announced in 1987, Michele Oka Doner was one of the respondents. Now 70, the artist had been living in the city for about five years when she heard about the competition.

“I was very interested in larger public space,” she told the Daily News. She’d seen a Diego Rivera mural in Detroit that seemed built into the building and she wanted achieve that for herself.

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“So I responded to this call,” she said.

What she had to work with was a 165-foot-long wall that was basically dead space.

“I thought God, what do you do with that? What can you put on a wall like that?” she remembered.

“The idea was that Herald Square was the busiest transit intersection possibly in the world at the time — that was in 1987. People are coming and going and you’ve got this low ceiling and long wall so I had the idea to create an inversion where you descend into light instead of dark.

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“It was a wild idea and a conceptual idea because there was a notion of dealing only with light,” she said.

Michele Oka Doner is the artist behind the “Radiant Site” art at the 34th Street/Herald subway stop.

To make that light and airy dream a reality, Oka Doner decided to design 11,000 tiles, all painted varying degrees of gold.

“This is the magic to it,” she said. Around waist-height, the tiles use a full component of gold luster. But, moving upward and downward from that, there’s less and less brilliance.

“It’s like a horizon,” she said. “Think of a horizon.”

For Oka Doner, her horizon started in Florida. She was born and raised in Miami Beach, but has been in SoHo for more than three decades now. Though she’s a New York City transplant, she’s been able to create work that fits in with the city’s distinctive subway style.

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One of the subway’s first architects — a man named Squire Vickers — decked out the system in the style of an anti-industrialist arts movement known as Arts and Crafts. One of the quintessential Arts and Crafts components throughout the system is the use of tiles, especially in name plate tiles on the platforms of many stations.

Oka Doner’s tiles were manufactured at the last surviving Arts and Crafts pottery maker in the country, she explained. Initially, the project was designed for an $80,000 budget, but later had to be expanded when the price of gold went up. Even though the tiles aren’t actually made of gold, gold paint still does contain some fraction of gold, she said.

The result, some say, is sublime.

“It was a spiritual piece of sculpture in that the passageway became bathed in this golden light,” Bloodworth said.

“They have a luminosity and it’s radiant and reflective and she saw it as creating a beauty within the space.

“I think there are different pieces that are quieter within our system and I think this one is and because it is a handmade wall people know that it has a sense of creating an aura of color and space,” she continued.

“The thing that is so beautiful about it is it has really stood the test of time.”