Walton family announces selection of BIG-Bjarke Ingels Group to plan and design the campus of a new STEM-focused university

Aerial view of the STEM-focused university designed by BIG and Polk Stanley Wilcox. All renderings by BIG.

Bentonville, Ark. (June 11, 2026) – Members of the Walton family today announced that BIG-Bjarke Ingels Group, the firm of architects and urbanists internationally renowned for its visionary and holistic sustainable design, has been selected to create the campus of the new STEM-focused university the family is establishing in Bentonville, Arkansas. Designs unveiled today for the campus, to be built on the former site of the Walmart Home Office, reveal a master plan that integrates the campus with Bentonville’s visionary series of parks, making the university a pathway between the downtown grid and the surrounding green spaces.

The heart of the campus, occupying two city blocks, will initially comprise a trio of buildings, distinctive in design but unified in their openness, earth tones, naturally weathering facades, and industrial forms, knit together on the site by new green spaces and public squares. Providing approximately 422,000 square feet of space in all, the three buildings give the campus an academic building, a student residence, and a makerspace, which together advance the university’s mission of preparing students to succeed in an era shaped by artificial intelligence and rapid technological change.

Multiple members of the Walton family are supporting the creation of the new university, including Tom Walton, Steuart Walton, and Alice Walton (through the Alice L. Walton Foundation). The university intends to welcome its first class of students in 2029 and to have tuition fully covered in its initial years of operation.

The STEM university campus will be the next in a series of large-scale projects that are transforming Bentonville, including the Crystal Bridges Campus, home to Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Heartland Whole Health Institute, and Alice L. Walton School of Medicine, and a future Bentonville-based health-and-wellness campus that will include learning spaces for Northwest Arkansas high-school students in health sciences, global business, technology, and engineering.

Tom Walton said, “We’re eager to bring the vision of Bjarke Ingels Group to Bentonville to help us make this new university a reality. The master plan and building designs they have given us are bold, imaginative, and highly practical all at once. They will inspire our students and faculty while complementing Bentonville’s urban and natural landscape.”

Alice Walton said, “Bjarke Ingels Group is making an important contribution to Bentonville’s growing collection of contemporary architecture and landscape design projects. Each has its own strong identity, but they all harmonize, showing that BIG and the other acclaimed architects working on these campuses understand that these designs need to have a sense of place of our region, and be welcoming to our community.”

Bjarke Ingels, founder and creative director of BIG, said, “The new STEM university in downtown Bentonville seeks to bridge the disconnect that often exists between academia and the working world around it. For the new campus, we have sought to break down the boundaries between campus and community through a lively new integrated neighborhood for faculty and citizens alike. The makerspace is conceived as an inhabited showcase, displaying a culture of physical experimentation and rapid prototyping to the passing citizens. It is our hope that this integration of the campus into the community will make higher education as accessible as possible, academically as well as socially. We are honored to work with the Walton family on imagining the future academic environment for a new kind of urban university in the heart of Bentonville.”

Makerspace

The heart of innovation on the new campus, the makerspace is designed as a series of stacking vitrines that house various workshops, labs, common areas, and a flexible forum. The activities within are visible to the street, showcasing the vibrant collaboration, research, and innovation taking place. The building will also include campus amenities, offices, and spaces for student services. Details of weathered steel mesh and stacked and interlocking boxes evoke the industrial sense of the space, with awnings angled to provide shade and minimize solar heat gain and glare, and terraces that reach out to the north.

Academic Building

With an open central atrium and floors that blend the various functions of the building program, the academic facility will encourage interactions among students, faculty, and staff with study, classroom, lab, and office spaces. Evoking Ozark vernacular architecture, the design for the building features a dogtrot breezeway and stacking that nods to the log houses historically found throughout Northwest Arkansas. Clerestory windows bring natural daylight into the atrium, illuminating surrounding spaces, reducing reliance on artificial lighting, and enhancing views into the atrium from adjacent classrooms.

Student Residences

The student residence building is organized as a figure-eight, carving out two elevated courtyards perched atop a dining hall and shared amenity spaces. While one courtyard is bathed in morning light, the other sees afternoon sun, all with views to the outdoors.

The campus is designed to embrace the community as much as it is designed to embrace the outdoors. These two facets of the design reflect the spirit of Bentonville as a welcoming community, offering visitors and residents innovative spaces, while maintaining its local style and scale.

The flexibility of each of these buildings is intentional. As technology changes, so should the curriculum, and the university spaces are designed to be adaptable over time.

Dr. David Mazyck, president of the STEM University, said: “Reflecting Bentonville’s culture of warmth and openness, the university will serve as an inviting gateway for companies and enterprises to engage with students, co-create innovation pipelines, and build incubators that catalyze sustained economic impact.”

Polk Stanley Wilcox Architects will serve as the Architect of Record for the project. The Arkansas-based firm recently designed Alice L Walton School of Medicine on the Crystal Bridges Campus.

Architect Wesley Walls, principal with Polk Stanley Wilcox, said, “We’re inspired to bring these designs to life, building cutting-edge STEM learning environments with a strong sense of place rooted in Bentonville’s landscape and community.”

About STEM-Focused University

In 2025, Steuart Walton and Tom Walton announced their vision to reimagine STEM education for the next generation of innovators, builders, and entrepreneurs through founding a STEM-focused university in their hometown of Bentonville, Arkansas. Multiple members of the Walton family are supporting this vision, including Alice Walton through the Alice L. Walton Foundation.

The non-profit, business-infused university will embed artificial intelligence across its academic programs, teaching methods, and institutional operations to help students create real-world value. It’s envisioned as a catalyst for regional talent, economic mobility, and long-term growth, strengthening Northwest Arkansas while shaping a national model for what STEM education can become.

BIG-Bjarke Ingels Group

BIG-Bjarke Ingels Group is a Copenhagen, New York, London, Barcelona, Shanghai, Los Angeles, Zurich, and Riyadh-based group of architects, designers, urbanists, landscape professionals, interior and product designers, researchers, and inventors. Led by Bjarke Ingels, BIG is currently involved in projects throughout Europe, the Americas, Asia, Oceania, and the Middle East, with completed projects including the Google HQ, the Bloomberg Student Center at Johns Hopkins University, and the LEGO Museum. BIG’s architecture emerges out of a careful analysis of how contemporary life constantly evolves and changes. The studio believes that by hitting the fertile overlap between pragmatic and utopia, architects can find the freedom to change the surface of our planet to better fit contemporary life forms.