Today, speed is no longer merely a spatio-temporal metric: it has become a dominant cultural imaginary, a social device that deeply shapes our perception of the world. In the field of mobility, speed operates as the main parameter by which the efficiency of connections is measured: high-speed trains, direct flights, frequent metro lines, instant digital networks. However, as theorists like Jeffrey Schnapp1 and Hartmut Rosa2 argue, the imperative of acceleration permeates our daily lives, generating a widespread sense of alienation and disconnection.
Yet the response to this condition does not necessarily lie in slowing down. Rosa instead proposes the concept of resonance: the capacity to establish meaningful and affective relationships with the world, interrupting the automatism of acceleration without rejecting its advantages. Within this framework, architecture plays a fundamental role by exploring how to build spaces that transform the logic of speed into opportunities for experience and human connection.
Starting from these premises, an analysis is developed around the stations of the Grand Paris Express, interpreted through the lens of spatial resonance. The work of the architecture firm TVK3 provides a compelling example of how infrastructural nodes can be reimagined as places that resist the demand for pure efficiency and instead articulate new forms of urban life. The book Places du Grand Paris, along with selected projects by the studio, reveals how an architectural practice can emerge that symbolically restitutes speed, creating conditions for co-presence, pause, and meaning within spaces of transit.
Speed, then, is not to be resisted, but rather translated and made perceptible—opening up a space for reflecting on the political and poetic potential of movement in the contemporary urban landscape.
- Schnapp, J. (2025) Storia rapida della velocità. Milano: Il Saggiatore ↩︎
- Rosa, H. (2015) Accelerazione e alienazione: Per una teoria critica del tempo nella tarda modernità. Torino: Einaudi. ↩︎
- TVK is an international architecture and urban design office, founded in Paris in 2003 by Pierre Alain Trévelo and Antoine Viger-Kohler ↩︎
Bibliography
- van Dijk, M., Vermeersch, L., Milano, C., Haspeslagh, W., & & van Grondelle, E. (2024). Sample Mobility | Society: Society Seen through the Lens of Mobilities. Zürich: Lars Müller Publishers.
- TVK (dir.), T., Soline Nivet, V. O., Antoine Fleury, G. T., Étienne Ballan, O., & RR&A, F. B. C. (2024). Places du Grand Paris: Principes de conception pour les espaces publics du Grand Paris Express. Paris: Building Books.
- Giedion, S. (1941). Time, space, and architecture: The growth of a new tradition. Harvard University Press.
