“Travel brings us back to ourselves.”
– Albert Camus (French writer, 1913-1960)
Journeys nowadays are rarely exciting or life-enhancing. They are more likely to serve the purpose of reaching the potentially exciting or life-enhancing destination as quickly as possible. After a two-year break due to Corona, we are regaining momentum and setting our sights on new transit speeds. Quickly bringing children to the nursery, quickly getting to the office, quickly driving a hundred kilometres to a customer and quickly heading off on a long-haul overseas holiday in summer. The higher the speeds, the shorter the other interim stages; the world has become smaller again. As many people feel this way, overcrowded transit zones are once again full of hectic, fraught travellers. Sometimes they stretch like a trail of ants marching through a nameless periphery; sometimes they huddle under neon signs near railway lines or airport gates. Anyone who dares stop in these places, who forgets about the time and destination, quickly feels like a foreign body in a place which is not designed to ever become welcoming or familiar. In a corner of a big city railway station, in a motel lost in the middle of nowhere or during a stopover in a country where we do not speak the language. The “lost-in-transition” feeling increases in these contexts, yet vastness, solitude and lack of familiarity actually offer us the most challenging, enriching and profound experiences. Fast, goal-oriented transit, on the other hand, means we turn our back on these spaces and challenges, we disregard the actual journey which brings us back to ourselves. This explains why good future-proof transit spaces, like the ALUCOBOND® projects presented in this issue, do not only concentrate on speedier travel and growing passenger numbers but also on the whole travel experience: quality travel is back in focus.
Read the new issue of ALUCOBOND’s digital magazine Forms & Elements.