The Five Thousand Pound Life: Land
Session Three: Spatial Logistics
Alex Klatskin, Rob Holmes, and Jesse LeCavalier; moderated by Coral Davenport
Recorded September 26, 2014
The Five Thousand Pound Life: Land was a symposium on rethinking land and its value in light of climate change organized by The Architectural League and co-sponsored by The Cooper Union Institute for Sustainable Design in September 2014.
The Spatial Logistics panel invited an industrial real estate developer and two designers and academics to unpack the spatial dimensions of the sometimes hidden networks of logistics and debate their consequences — the good, bad, and unknown — for design and society.
In this conversation with Coral Davenport, a reporter who covers environmental policy for The New York Times, Klatskin, Holmes, and LeCavalier consider multiple ways that design intersects with logistics. All three believe that design — a creative process that is, by nature, inefficient — should learn from logistics. As Holmes describes it, design disciplines should co-opt this set of techniques and orient them to a set of values other than economic efficiency, thus playing a proactive rather than reactive role in determining the kinds of spaces we as a society want. Klatskin cites two examples of the implications of the continued pursuit of efficiency in design: the shift in e-commerce distribution strategies from distant warehouses to the urban core and the design and production of customized packaging as “the new frontier for efficiency.” An important message from the entire session is well summarized by LeCavalier: the language of logistics should “become more a part of our vocabulary” so that we can all talk about where our things come from and where they go.
Alex Klatskin is a General Partner of Forsgate Industrial Partners, a private industrial real estate development and investment firm based in Teterboro, New Jersey.
Rob Holmes is an assistant professor of Landscape Architecture at the University of Florida and co-founder of Mammoth, a blog about infrastructures, logistics, landscapes, and architecture.
Jesse LeCavalier is working on a book about the architecture and logistics of Walmart, forthcoming from the University of Minnesota Press. He 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.
Coral Davenport covers energy and environmental policy for The New York Times.
The Five Thousand Pound Life (5KL) is an initiative of The Architectural League on new ways of thinking, talking, and acting on architecture, climate change, and our economic future.
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