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Test 1 / 20

Roland Paoletti

An architect who revolutionized the lives of London’s commuters.

A
Roland Paoletti was the driving force behind the dramatic, award-winning stations on the £3 billion Jubilee Line Extension (JLE) to the London Underground system, the most ambitious building programme on the Tube for many decades. An irascible Anglo-Italian, Paoletti possessed the persuasiveness and tenacity to take on the vested political interests at play in the planning of the 10-mile Jubilee Line Extension to ensure good design and innovation. Historically, architects employed on Tube projects had been restricted to ‘fitting out’ the designs of railway and civil engineers with few or no aesthetic concerns, and whom Paoletti dismissed as visionless ‘trench-diggers. The Jubilee line would be unique in that for the first time the architects would be responsible for designing entire underground stations.

B
As the commissioning architect in overall charge, Paoletti’s approach was to let light flood down into the stations along the line. The project’s centrepiece was the extraordinary huge new station at Canary Wharf, designed by Norman Foster and Partners to handle up to 40,000 passengers an hour at peak times. ‘Everybody keeps saying that it’s like a cathedral; complained Paoletti.‘They’re wrong. It actually is a cathedral: Explaining his approach to designing underground stations, Paoletti likened the Jubilee line to architectural free-form jazz, the stations responding to their different contexts as dramatic variations on a theme. Instead of uniformity, Paoletti envisaged variety achieved in the beauty of raw materials like concrete, and the architectural power of simple, large spaces for robust and practical stations.

C
He procured the most talented individual architects he could find to design 11 new stations along the line, creating a unique variety of architectural statement pieces – notably different but all beautiful – in what had been a largely desolate stretch of urban east London.‘For the price of an underground ticket; he promised, ‘you will see some of the greatest contributions to engineering and architecture worldwide’ Paoletti’s sweeping vision did not disappoint. With their swagger and individualism, the stations have been widely acclaimed as a tour de force in public transport architecture.

D
In pressing for a seamless marriage between architecture and engineering, Paoletti was concerned to make the stations pleasing to the eye, and the daily grind of commuters using them as uplifting an experience as possible. The result was generally reckoned to be the finest set of stations since the classic designs for the Piccadilly line by Charles Holden in the 1930s. In Holden’s day, design stopped at the top of the escalators leading down to the platforms, a symptom of the Tube’s tradition of treating architecture and engineering as separate disciplines. From the start, Paoletti promised ‘a symbiosis of architecture and engineering’ throughout. This is particularly evident at Westminster station, where Michael Hopkins solved structural difficulties by designing fantastic supporting structures redolent of science-fiction – what Paoletti called ‘engineering that expresses itself as architecture…  in which people can delight.’

E
He wanted the designs of the JLE stations to have a uniformity of voice, or, as he put it, ‘a philosophical uniformity’. Paoletti contrasted the drama of MacCormac Jamieson Prichard’s design for Southwark station with the vast glass drum of Ron Herron’s Canada Water station, intended as a response to the area’s bleakness, ‘a big, splendid beacon that has transformed the area from a wasteland almost overnight’ To critics who complained about the expense of these grand designs, Paoletti pointed out that the same cut-and-cover, box-station design that allowed his architects a free hand with their various structures also saved London Underground millions in tunnelling costs. ‘In any case, he noted, ‘you have to decide at the beginning whether you’re going to see an underground station as a kind of vehicular underpass that happens to have people in it, or whether it’s a building; a building with some other kind of job to do, like making people comfortable.’

In which section of the article are the following mentioned?

the previously unattractive nature of the locations of most of the stations
Text C
a comparison Paoletti made to illustrate his approach to the JLE project
Text B
the immediate and massive effect that one of the stations had on its surroundings
Text E
a description that Paoletti considered not to be wholly accurate
Text B
a fundamental question concerning the function of stations in underground systems
Text E
an explanation Paoletti gave for why certain comments about the new buildings were incorrect
Text E
Paoletti’s desire to unite elements that had previously been seen as wholly different from each other
Text D
personal qualities that enabled Paoletti to tackle the JLE project successfully
Text A
parts of a station architects were not responsible for in the past
Text D
Paoletti’s opinion of those previously responsible for designing stations
Text A
Test 2 / 20

The unstoppable spirit of inquiry

The president of the Royal Society, Martin Rees, celebrates the long history of one of Britain’s greatest institutions.

A
The Royal Society began in 1660. From the beginning, the wide dissemination of scientific ideas was deemed important. The Society started to publish Philosophical Transaction, the first scientific journal, which continues to this day. The Society’s journals pioneered what is still the accepted procedure whereby scientific ideas are subject to peer review – criticised, refined and codified into ‘public knowledge’. Over the centuries, they published Isaac Newton’s researches on light, Benjamin Franklin’s experiments on lightning, Volta’s first battery and many of the triumphs of twentieth century science. Those who want to celebrate this glorious history should visit the Royal Society’s archives via our Trailblazing website.

В
The founders of the Society enjoyed speculation, but they were also intensely engaged with the problems of their era, such as improvements to timekeeping and navigation. After 350 years, our horizons have expanded, but the same engagement is imperative in the 21st century. Knowledge has advanced hugely, but it must be deployed for the benefit of the ever-growing population of our planet, all empowered by ever more powerful technology. The silicon chip was perhaps the most transformative single invention of the past century; it has allowed miniaturisation and spawned the worldwide reach of mobile phones and the internet. It was physicists who developed the World Wide Web and, though it impacts us all, scientists have benefited especially.

C
Traditional journals survive as guarantors of quality, but they are supplemented by a blogosphere of widely varying quality. The latter cries out for an informal system of quality control. The internet levels the playing fields between researchers in major centres and those in relative isolation. It has transformed the way science is communicated and debated. In 2002, three young Indian mathematicians invented a faster scheme for factoring large numbers -something that would be crucial for code-breaking. They posted their results on the web. Within a day, 20,000 people had downloaded the work, which was the topic of hastily convened discussions in many centres of mathematical research around the world. The internet also allows new styles of research. For example, in the old days, astronomical research was stored on delicate photographic plates; these were not easily accessible and tiresome to analyse. Now such data (and large datasets in genetics and particle physics) can be accessed and downloaded anywhere. Experiments and natural events can be followed in real-time.

D
We recently asked our members what they saw as the most important questions facing us in the years ahead and we are holding discussion meetings on the ‘Top Ten’. Whatever breakthroughs are in store, we can be sure of one thing: the widening gulf between what science enables us to do and what it’s prudent or ethical actually to do. In respect of certain developments, regulation will be called for, on ethical as well as prudential grounds. The way science is applied is a matter not just for scientists. All citizens need to address these questions. Public decisions should be made, after the widest possible discussion, in the light of the best scientific evidence available. That is one of the key roles of the Society. Whether it is the work of our Science Policy Centre, our journals, our discussion meetings, our work in education or our public events, we must be at the heart of helping policy-makers and citizens make informed decisions.

E
Our science isn’t dogma. Its assertions are sometimes tentative, sometimes compelling; noisy controversy doesn’t always connote balanced arguments; risks are never absolutely zero, even if they are hugely outweighed by potential benefits. In promoting an informed debate, the media are crucial. When reporting a scientific controversy, the aim should be neither to exaggerate risks and uncertainties, nor to gloss over them. This is indeed a challenge, particularly when institutional, political or commercial pressures distort the debate. Scientists often bemoan the public’s weak grasp of science — without some ‘feel’ for the issues, public debate can’t get beyond sloganising. But they protest too much: there are other issues where public debate is, to an equally disquieting degree, inhibited by ignorance. The Royal Society aims to sustain Britain’s traditional strength in science, but also to ensure that wherever science impacts on people’s lives, it is openly debated.

In which section of the article are the following mentioned?

a belief that a certain development has been of particular use to scientists
Text B
the variety of ways in which the Royal Society encourages people who are not scientists to consider scientific issues
Text D
a rapid reaction to research being made public
Text C
a particular development that requires urgent action to improve it
Text C
a resource for information on past scientific discoveries
Text A
a lack of understanding of scientific matters among people in general
Text E
a system that the Royal Society introduced
Text A
the fact that scientists do not always reach firm conclusions
Text E
a problem that is not limited to the world of science
Text E
the belief that certain things that are possible are not desirable
Text D