The Rule of Logistics: Walmart and the Architecture of Fulfillment by Jesse LeCavalier (review)

In the catalog of the Library of Congress, a single entry is classified under "Building layout—Psychological aspects." While it stands to reason that several titles have merited such a designation, only one, apparently, has demanded it. The Rule of Logistics: Walmart and the Architecture of Fulfillment, by Jesse LeCavalier, earns this tantalizing heading by investigating the nexus between the technological and the phenomenological in everyday life. LeCavalier, an architect-theorist writing primarily for other architect-theorists, is not concerned with the typical fare of his field, the iconic designs of starchitects. Instead, he is focused on the footprint of a multinational corporation, whose specialty is flow and whose buildings are less architectural than infrastructural, indeed less like buildings than "gigantic computers" (157). Unpacking the rise of Walmart from the standpoint of the stockroom, LeCavalier assembles an imaginative and provocative study about the built environment of logistics, about how logistics "takes shape" (10) and how it produces ordinary landscapes through extraordinary means.

LeCavalier cues up this novel approach to Walmart as "a large technical system" (25) by setting his introduction at a real estate convention in Las Vegas, where, annually, Walmart rents a booth to peddle square footage. Square footage defines Walmart for LeCavalier, along with statistics; he posits that Walmart's success has hinged on its coordination of land and data. Its approach to buildings, locations, bodies, and territory—each a chapter topic, after a first chapter on the concept of logistics—has centered on "translating the world of objects into the world of information" (48). Shelved in this account are toys and T-shirts, or what LeCavalier might call the surface appearance of the fungible content of a building layout. Spotlighted are bar codes, satellites, pallets, and conveyor belts. It has been via a decidedly non-phantasmagoric network of numbers and wires, LeCavalier contends, that a brand headquartered in rural Arkansas has entered our psyches.

Accordingly, LeCavalier details, Walmart has prioritized the mechanics of packaging over the aesthetics in a departure from the glamour of older trailblazers like General Motors or IBM. LeCavalier models this sensibility, brilliantly, with his own camera work. The book brims with visual evidence—more than a hundred images and eleven color plates—culled from corporate brochures, textbooks, and patents, and supplemented by a mixture of media by LeCavalier himself. His photographs (I count nineteen, as well as a few typological sets in the style of Bernd and Hilla Becher) are fabulous in their ugliness. There is a wonderful dissonance between LeCavalier's gorgeous diagrams and maps and his banal, grainy snapshots of Walmart's offices and distribution centers: the contrast accents how Walmart has valorized the functional and rendered the global village "a coordinate system" (125). LeCavalier notes that this way of seeing was first epitomized by Sam Walton's "obsession with aerial reconnaissance" (118)—Walton loved to employ helicopters to survey prospects, apprehending geography from an altitude that liberated space from place. The result, ultimately, has been an urbanism that eludes "imageability" (61). And the issue, now, for LeCavalier, is not that Walmart is so massive and multiscalar as to thwart realist representation (as in earlier interpretations of this problematic by Bertolt Brecht or Fredric Jameson); it is that Walmart is post-human, or "abstract," to invoke one of the book's key words.

This decentering of people distinguishes the book from another important study of Walmart. Nelson Lichtenstein's Retail Revolution¹ devotes one short chapter to logistics, and that chapter mentions Walton's chopper rides in one short sentence. Lichtenstein does appreciate the significance of Walmart's techutopia: "The home office in Bentonville," Lichtenstein writes, for instance, "requires from its stores and vendors a sea of data that the company can instantly translate into a complete picture of its sales, profits, expenses and inventory" (53). But it is LeCavalier who...