Roland Paoletti  Romano Roland Paoletti, CBE (23 April 1931 – 13 November 2013) was a British-Italian architect. He was best known for his work on the early stations for Hong Kong's Mass Transit Railway, and for commissioning the award-winning designs of the stations of London Underground's Jubilee Line Extension. He was described by the Architectural Review as "the Medici of London Transport". Paoletti was born in London in 1931, at the City of London Hospital. His father was Italian and his mother French. The name Romano came from a church local to Lucca, Italy, where his father's family are thought to have lived for at least 700 years. His father was treated as an enemy alien in the Second World War and the family had to move to Scotland. In 1942 Paoletti was sent to Clongowes Wood College, a Jesuit boarding school in County Kildare, Ireland. From 1948 he studied architecture at the University of Manchester, then moved to London to work with Basil Spence. After this he undertook postgraduate studies at the Istituto Universitario di Architettura in Venice under Carlo Scarpa and Giancarlo De Carlo. He became an assistant to Pier Luigi Nervi on the building of a new British Embassy in Rome to a design by Spence. Paoletti later moved to Hong Kong, working at Palmer and Turner before becoming an architect at the rapidly expanding Mass Transit Railway (MTR) in 1975. He became chief architect in the MTR's programme to build a new urban transport system. He was responsible for the design of 37 stations over a period of twelve years. In 1990 Sir Wilfrid Newton, head of the MTR, left Hong Kong to become chairman of London Regional Transport and Paoletti joined him in London, as commissioning architect for the new stations as part of the Jubilee Line Extension. There had been plans to extend the London Underground's Jubilee line for many years. The final route for the extension involved eleven stations: Westminster, Waterloo, Southwark, London Bridge, Bermondsey, Canada Water, Canary Wharf, North Greenwich, Canning Town, West Ham and Stratford, plus a new depot at Stratford. Since the 1930s, London Underground's architects had designed the surface buildings, but the sub-surface spaces were designed by civil engineers and only fitted out by the architects. Paoletti hired different architects to design each station, while maintaining that all should share an "underlying philosophy and essential elements."