en.Wedoany.com Reported - BIG – Bjarke Ingels Group has been selected to design a new STEM university campus in Bentonville, Arkansas, USA. Located near downtown Bentonville on the former site of Walmart's headquarters, the project is designed in collaboration with Polk Stanley Wilcox Architects, who serve as the architect of record. The campus spans approximately 422,000 square feet (nearly 39,200 square meters), encompassing green spaces, a public plaza, an academic building, a makerspace, and a student residence hall. The university is scheduled to welcome its first students in 2029.
Situated between the downtown square in northeastern Bentonville and Gateway Park to the southwest, the campus is organized around a historic railway line as its core. The landscape design, inspired by the natural scenery of the Ozark region, aims to renaturalize the site through outdoor gathering spaces. BIG states that the master plan's goal is to blur the boundaries between campus and city through a vibrant, integrated community, allowing faculty, staff, and residents to share spaces and enhancing the accessibility of higher education.
BIG founder Thomas Christoffersen stated that the three buildings—the residence hall, academic building, and makerspace—each support the learning, collaboration, experimentation, and innovation dimensions of campus life. These buildings naturally connect the campus with downtown Bentonville through materials and design: the makerspace uses weathering steel, the academic building features copper that will develop a patina over time, and the student residence uses reddish-brown cement panels.
Each of the three buildings has its own character but maintains consistency in earthy tones and facade treatment. The makerspace, covering 130,614 square feet (approximately 12,000 square meters), is designed as stacked glass display boxes containing workshops and laboratories, with indoor activities visible from the street. The academic building, spanning 147,525 square feet (approximately 13,700 square meters), features a dogtrot-style corridor and cascading forms, echoing the local vernacular architecture of the Ozarks. The student residence hall accommodates 400 beds, organized in a figure-eight layout with two elevated courtyards overlooking the outdoors, along with dining and shared facilities.
Clad in Corten weathering steel, the makerspace is expected to develop a patina in the climate of Northwest Arkansas, paying homage to the region's industrial heritage. The volume creates diverse interior spaces through stacking, shifting, and interlocking, while industrial-style glass display windows and weathering steel mesh sunshades help reduce solar heat gain. The academic building is conceived as a stack of several bar-shaped volumes, with each floor alternating in orientation; the transparent spaces between the bars establish visual connections between floors, and the curved metal facade echoes the carved wooden elements of local cabins. The student residence hall is organized in a figure-eight layout, opening two terraces on the fourth floor and placing an elevated courtyard above the dining and shared facilities.
BIG has also recently released images of the EVE Music Hall in Čepin, eastern Croatia, designed in collaboration with SIRRAH projekt and Theatre Projects, which is currently under construction. Additionally, the New York Penn Station renovation project has been awarded to a team led by Practice for Architecture and Urbanism (PAU) in partnership with HNTB and HOK, while Herzog & de Meuron has been selected to lead the revitalization of the former People's Socialist Republic-era Congress Palace in Tirana.
