This presentation tracks Walmart’s spatial operations — its building efforts, its real estate practices, its management protocols, and its urban investments — to show how the company’s logistical obsessions have implications at all scales: from undermining the stability of architecture while investing it with political capacity; to challenging the inalienable features of locations by focusing on the aspects that connect rather than distinguish them; to blurring the threshold between man and machine in order to create new opportunities for inhabitation. Suggested here are also new manifestations of architecture and urbanism based on the features of logistics itself, including prototypes, loose forms, fungible locations, ambiguous borders, and recombinant territories.

Jesse LeCavalier is a member of Co + LeCavalier and an assistant professor of architecture at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, where he coordinates the first year design studio. He is currently working on a book about the architecture and logistics of Walmart, forthcoming from the University of Minnesota Press. LeCavalier’s writing has been recognized by The Atlantic and the Core77 Design Awards and his research has been supported by the Graham Foundation, the New York State Council for the Arts, and the BMW Foundation. He was the 2010-11 Sanders Fellow at the University of Michigan, a Poiesis Fellow at the Institute for Public Knowledge at NYU, and a researcher at the Singapore-ETH Future Cities Laboratory.

Daniels Sessions aims to explore new and alternative viewpoints on architectural practice and research. The series features speakers who present unconventional perspectives and work from both inside and outside of the discipline. Daniels Sessions aims to provoke thought and generate discussion in a less formal setting. Following the lecture, audience members are invited to continue the conversation with the speaker in the Graduate Student Lounge, located in the lower level of 230 College Street.