This book addresses Walmart's architecture and urbanism in terms of its logistics operations. For Walmart, logistics dictates the design of the retailer's buildings, governs their deployment, and conditions the workers who operate them. By tracking Walmart's spatial operations, this book shows 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 create new possibilites for inhabitation. By doing so, the project identifies opportunities based on the features of logistics itself and argues that these concepts—including prototypes, loose forms, fungible locations, ambiguous borders, and recombinant territories—can help us think differently as we confront some of the contemporary challenges facing architecture and the city.

Jesse LeCavalier is an award-winning designer, writer, and educator. He is assistant professor of architecture at the New Jersey School of Architecture at NJIT and author of The Rule of Logistics: Walmart and the Architecture of Fulfillment (University of Minnesota Press, 2016). LeCavalier was a recipient of the New Faculty Teaching Award from the Association of the Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA) in 2015, 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 Lab. His work has been supported by the Graham Foundation, the New York State Council for the Arts, the BMW Foundation, NJIT, and the ETH Zurich. Recent publications include his contribution to the Oslo Architecture Triennale catalog (Lars Müller, 2016), the introductory essay to one of four sections in Infrastructure Space (Ruby Press, 2016), a contributed essay to the volume Smart City: Utopian Vision or False Dawn? (Routledge, 2016), an article in Volume 47: Short Circuits, and an essay in Harvard Design Magazine 43.