If it weren’t for the MTR, the Chinese language may never had found one of its best type designers. But even when he started working for Hong Kong’s fledgling rapid transit system, Sammy Or didn’t quite understand the significance of what he was doing. “Honestly, at the time, it was only a job,” he says. “I didn’t think about what it would mean to so many people.”
Or had recently finished his studies in design and was working at an advertising firm when a friend told him the MTR was hiring. “I was earning between HK$700 and $800 per month at the time,” he recalls. “The MTR doubled it.” With just over a year before the MTR was set to open, Or joined a team under MTR chief architect Roland Paoletti.
That was in 1978. Three years earlier, the Mass Transit Railway Corporation had broken ground on Hong Kong’s first metro system, which would eventually grow into the 10-line, 99-station network we know today. The government-owned company didn’t just need to build tunnels and stations: it needed to build an identity. Designer Misha Black provided an eye-catching logo that is still used today. But Paoletti had a more difficult task: to make the physical spaces of the MTR memorable on a limited budget, without the expensive architectural flourishes that distinguished many of the other metro systems being built in the 1970s.
Paoletti had little say over the volume of the stations, which were planned by engineers to be as simple and efficient as possible. So he invested his creative talent in what has become the MTR’s aesthetic calling card: vividly coloured mosaic tiles that would distinguish each station despite the similarity of their overall design.
Tiles were used because they were a cheap and abundant construction material in Hong Kong, and there was no apparent rhyme or reason to Paoletti’s colour choices. Tsim Sha Tsui contrasts black and yellow; Jordan is green; Yau Ma Tei is grey and white; Mong Kok is red; and so forth. The two notable exceptions are Choi Hung, with its bands of rainbow-coloured tiles the reflect the station’s name in Chinese (彩虹 coi2 hung4, “rainbow”), and Diamond Hill, whose black finish is flecked with bits of silver. (Mong Kok also has red-hued terrazzo floors, a nod to its crimson wall tiles, whereas most other stations use grey-toned terrazzo flooring.)
Paoletti’s strategy worked: the use of simple, bold colours managed to give each station an identity. “Those early stations, there’s no architecture to them, there’s just finishes slapped on them,” says the MTR’s current chief architect, Andrew Mead. “But when people pull up they recognise what station it is because of the primary colours he used.”
At the time, Paoletti was 47, and he had moved to Hong Kong from his native London to work at venerable architecture firm Palmer and Turner. Paoletti had previously worked with Scottish architect Basil Spence — designer of the famous Beehive that houses the New Zealand Parliament — and Italian architect and engineer Pier Luigi Nervi, whose innovative approach to reinforced concrete helped Europe rebuild from the devastation of World War II. The MTR was Paoletti’s first railway system and he approached it with the seriousness it deserved.
“I wanted to quit the MTR after just a few months,” recalls Sammy Or. Whereas the advertising firm he had left was freewheeling and casual, the atmosphere at the MTR felt serious. “At the ad firm we listened to The Eagles on the radio, but at the MTR it was only classical music,” he says. It was a culture shock, but it gave Or a chance to more carefully consider his work. “I started to learn a lot about typography. To me, before, it was just about page layout. But in the MTR it was more like environmental design. You had to think about angles and visibility. It was quite amazing.”
Or was tasked with creating signage for each station’s name, which would be imposed on the tile walls that lined each platform. There was little precedent for a metro system with signage in both English and Chinese; at the time, the only other metro in Greater China was in Beijing, and its signage was perfunctory at best. “There were no modern Chinese fonts at the time,” says Or. So he developed one.
The result was MTR Song Script (gong2 tit3 sung3 tai2 港鐵宋體), a 200-character custom font based on the printed script that developed during the Song Dynasty (960–1279). Like other Song scripts — which are also referred to as Ming scripts (明體 ming4 tai2) in Hong Kong and Taiwan — it has thick vertical strokes to contrast thin horizontal strokes, and serif-like triangles at the end of the horizontal strokes. “We wanted to represent Chinese culture but in a modern way,” says Or.
After developing the Chinese font, Or needed to pair it with an English counterpart. “At the time it was assumed that a serif font like Times Roman matched Song script,” says Or. But he didn’t like the way they looked together. “So we used Helvetica and found it worked.”
Or remembers Paoletti as an encouraging and open-minded boss. “He really supported the arts,” he says. It turned out the serious atmosphere that had struck Or when he first joined the MTR belied a real dedication to creativity. “It wasn’t very organised – we had a lot of brainstorming and there was a lot of improvisation,” Or recalls. Later in his career, Paoletti himself confirmed this approach: ““[Railway stations] are like jazz, continuous improvisation, and are only as good as the band that is improvising the tune,” he said.
A key example was when Paoletti discovered that one of the architects on his team, Abe Au, was an amateur calligrapher; he encouraged him to create ink-brush calligraphy to represent each of the names of the stations on the Island Line, which began construction soon after the MTR’s first line opened in 1979. Those calligraphic panels are now one of the most recognisable elements of the MTR’s design. “The script is like a trademark of the MTR, showing a distinct Hong Kong culture and making the railway environment less dull than if standard Chinese fonts were used,” public transport advocate Quentin Cheng told the South China Morning Post last year.
As the MTR expanded through the years, it moved away from some of its visual heritage. When the Tung Chung Line was built in the mid-1990s, “they got rid of the mosaics and the calligraphy,” notes Mead. Since joining the MTR as chief architect in 2013, after having worked on transport design in Singapore and Dubai, Mead has been committed to showcasing the calligraphy and mosaic tiles, although to a more limited extent than in the original stations, as the tiles can be difficult to maintain. The South Island Line, which opened in 2015, and the extensions of the Tuen Ma and East Rail lines, which opened in 2021 and 2022 respectively, incorporate both of those features. “My ambition is that people build these new stations and they don’t really notice we extended the line,” he says. “They’re modernised and updated while respecting the heritage.”
Paoletti left Hong Kong in 1990, following the MTR’s then-chairman, Wilfrid Newton, to London Regional Transport. Back in his hometown, he began working on an extension to the London Underground’s Jubilee Line. After more than a decade of kitting out engineer-designed stations in Hong Kong, Paoletti finally got his chance to design the new stations from scratch. “Dismissing the engineers as visionless ‘trench-diggers,’ Paoletti wanted to transform the journeys of commuters from the mundane to the marvellous, making the stations uplifting,” noted The Independent in its obituary of Paoletti, who died in 2013.
The new stations had vast, airy spaces that were often likened to those of a cathedral. Their large volumes had little in common with the low-ceilinged spaces of early MTR stations, but Mead notes they have one point in common: mosaic tiles. They are found throughout the Jubilee Line extension, albeit in a muted grey rather than the bold colours of the MTR. “We have this shared legacy from Roland,” he says.
The MTR’s legacy can be felt in the world of Chinese typography, too. After leaving the company in 1981, Sammy Or dedicated himself to type design. He is now considered one of the world’s leading Chinese typographers, a pioneering talent who helped modernise Chinese type for the digital era. “Even the MTR began using one of my fonts, but I don’t think they realised I was the one who designed it,” he says with a wry smile.
When he looks back at the work he did for the MTR, Or is slightly nonplussed; it’s his earliest typographical work and he feels he has become much more skilled and sophisticated since then. But he is touched that many people consider his station names, mounted as they are on vividly coloured mosaic tiles, to be an iconic part of Hong Kong’s visual identity. “A lot of people know me because of the MTR stations,” he says. “I never expected so many people to be amazed by that.”
Photo credit: all photos are courtesy of Kevin Mak.