LECAVALIER R + D

How the world’s largest retailer is redefining architecture by organizing flows of merchandise and information across space and time

The Rule of Logistics analyzes Walmart’s stores, distribution centers, databases, and inventory practices to make sense of its spatial and architectural ramifications. A major new contribution to architectural history and theory, this book helps us understand how retailing today is changing our bodies, brains, buildings, and cities.

To purchase, click here

Machinic Wilderness transforms Vyzvolennia Square and the terminus of Mira Avenue into an active and dynamic public landscape. The project takes abundant surplus steel slag and applies a new technique that makes it both non-toxic and an active carbon sink. This weathered and granular material is delivered to the site and through an AI-driven process called “terramorphing,” is shaped into a constantly evolving set of landforms that support a wide range of uses but do not overdetermine those uses.

Machinic Wilderness takes advantage of this material abundance to create a landscape-in-motion that simulates natural landscapes in practice but not in form. Like a dune landscape, the properties of Machinic Wilderness are shifting and unpredictable and change from one week to the next. This active landscape is supported by four infrastructural armatures that engage the DASU building to support public life outside and to catalyze transformations of the interior. Imagined as “minor infrastructures” these four trestle-like armatures are assembled from sustainably sourced cross-laminated timber and introduce new public and circulatory functions while also activating the spaces in and around DASU. Taken together, the armatures and the active landscape they support offre Mariupol a public space that takes on qualities bigger than the space itself.

Through techniques and materials generated form the industrial history of the city, Machinic Wilderness builds on the past while looking to the future. How can a public space become bigger than itself? How can it generate its identity and techniques though the industrial traditions that are so much a part of the place’s history?

Sudbury 2050 Urban Design Competition

Finalist.

The City of Sudbury has the opportunity to become a leader in urban transformation by acknowledging and leaving behind its history characterized by extraction, environmental destruction, and dispossession and instead to look toward a future characterized by cultivation, nourishment, and support.

Sudbury is in a landscape of incredible beauty and inhabited by a resourceful population who value their independence and self-sufficiency. But Sudbury has its share of challenges, many with urban implications: an aging population; the effects of opioid addiction; a history of local sovereignty denied; infrastructure systems in need of upgrading; all on top of a history of environmental destruction driven by the mining industry. Urban design often assumes economic growth as its driver and as its yardstick. Such growth is often built on the same extraction-based industries that are responsible for some of these problems. Increasingly, there is a growing awareness of not just the limits of this approach but of the harm that it causes through the creation of structural inequities that become self-reinforcing. In other words, as the environment’s resources are depleted, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.

Alimentary Urbanism begins with a simple but fundamental question: What would a city be like if its infrastructure was directed toward nourishing and supporting its population? We borrow the term from the text “Beyond Wiindigo Infrastructure” by Winona LaDuke and Deborah Cowen in which they outline a path to a “regenerative economy” through a reframing of infrastructure not as tool of extraction and propagation of a fossil fuel economy (e.g. oil pipelines) but rather as transformative and focused on “people and kin before profits.”

To translate these ideas into an urban design framework,this project envisions a thriving Sudbury by transforming its sites of extractive mining operations into a suite of regenerative economic practices: food cultivation; energy production; reforestation and timber production; as well as new forms of education, healthcare, outreach, and recreation. The Downtown Core becomes a new hub for these activities and a model for a regenerative economy. The abundant reforested mines support innovative and widespread use of cross-laminated timber (CLT) and transforms the look and feel of Downtown. Two “Commons Corridors” extend from the railyard to Elm Street and become sites of new housing, educational, and community institutions while the Rainbow Centre is made into a vibrant public market. These economic drivers repurpose and expand the area’s robust rail network to redistribute new assets throughout Sudbury’s diverse neighborhoods. A series of new rail spurs sponsor community infrastructure nodes that provide essential services as well as cyclical recreational, social, and enrichment opportunities in the form of a fleet of mobile programs.

Alimentary Urbanism is a strategic framework that imagines a middle-out approach to urban design and governance. Not a top-down model of state redevelopment mandate (which has a bad history in Sudbury), nor a “bottom-up” approach that depends either on market forces or individual ingenuity, this approach builds new cooperative community organizations that support incremental, deliberate and collective self-determination.

Fulfillment describes a feeling of deep contentment. It is also the process of picking, packing, and shipping e-commerce orders — often gathered under the larger category of logistics. The work collected here, produced during 2018 and 2019 by participants in a seminar at the Yale School of Architecture, explores the ways in which the processes, actors, and technologies related to fulfillment actively shape the built environment.

Website can be found here.

SHELF LIFE, our entry as a finalist for the 2018 MoMA PS1 Young Architects Program, intervenes in the material systems of logistics to recontextualize a major but invisible part of many people’s daily lives: the industrial pallet rack.

The project is made of RACKS, TRACKS, and STACKS.

The RACKS form a grid of aisles and cross-aisles. Selective removal of racks from this grid creates s series of open gathering spaces or clearings.

The TRACKS are assembled from standard overhead conveyance systems and act as conduits of light, sound, and fog to generate different atmospheres in the clearings and to help guide visitors into the depths of the project.

The STACKS are custom furniture built into the RACKS from off-the-shelf components. They provide a range of possibilities for inhabitation.

We imagine the space of SHELF LIFE to be both recognizable and elusive. The project is a social and experiential infrastructure that use the physical material of e-commerce to invite exploration, discovery, and reflection on familiar elements assembled in a surprising and new context.

Jesse LeCavalier

Project team: Ayesha Ghosh, Jesse McCormick, Zachary White

Structural engineering support: LED - Laufs Engineering Design, New York City & Berlin

Material and installation support: Headzup Material Handling Solutions

Thermal systems support: Forrest Meggers, Princeton University

Visualizations: nightnurse images

Production support team: Adara Azeez, Frank Deblasio, Nick Licausi, Alexis Luna, Tanya Maneintr, Brian Mourato, Gabe Ng, Pier Paolo Pala, Darshan Parikh,Sam Pires, Liliana Torres, Chau Tran, Stephanie Tran

Proposal for Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism 2021

In working to overcome the obstacle of time and space to sustain global commerce, logistics remakes the world in its image. Architecture and the human-computer interface reveal points of friction in this process, mediating between territory, body, and network. 

https://www.artpapers.org/logistics-make-the-world/

The architectures of logistics are designed to reduce friction and to enable the rapid distribution of material. As a result, they are characterized by a systems-based approach that emphasizes compatibility and nimbleness. 

Taking the form of a mechanical drawing display, the project uses motorized conveyor belts rollers and continuous drawings loops to endlessly combine the elements of Walmart's logistical system. 

How can architects adapt Walmart’s logistical expertise to make better-performing environments?

https://placesjournal.org/article/all-those-numbers-logistics-territory-and-walmart/
 

thiswill-this.net

Competition-winning project with John Harwood and Guillaume Mojon. 

Published by Standpunkte (Basel 2009).

More information here: 

http://loudpaper.typepad.com/afewzines/2009/08/standpunkte-this-will-this-1.html

This essay interrogates the new forms of experimentation with urban territory emerging as a result of ubiquitous computing infrastructures. We label these protocols “test-bed urbanism.” Smart, sentient, stupid, and speculative all at once, these new methods for spatial development are changing the form, function, economy, and administration of urban life.

http://www.academia.edu/3778290/Test_Bed_Urbanism

Stay tuned for more information soon.