The Alice L. Walton Foundation has chosen CannonDesign and EDSA to design a 100-acre healthcare campus in east Bentonville, Arkansas, a project Walton hopes will redefine what a medical environment looks and feels like.
Early renderings of the Bentonville Health Care Campus show a serene, glass and timber complex tucked into restored meadows and tree-lined paths, unmistakably in the Ozarks. If the concept rings familiar, it’s because Bentonville is in the middle of a design boom courtesy of Walton-backed institutions.
Over the past decade, the Walton’s and their various ventures have redrawn Northwest Arkansas’s cultural, educational, and medical landscape. The Crystal Bridges’s expansions, the bikeable Ledger, and Walmart’s Gensler-designed headquarters have collectively turned Bentonville into something like a pseudo-philanthropic city-state with each new project slotting into a tightly coordinated ecosystem. The Bentonville Health Care Campus is the latest addition, extending that network into specialty clinical care. Together with the Heartland Whole Health Institute by Marlon Blackwell Architects, which opened earlier this year, and the Alice L. Walton School of Medicine, which welcomed its first class in July, the three institutions cover medical education, health policy, and clinical care. The new specialty care center will bring clinical practice fully into the fold, with Mercy and the Cleveland Clinic collaborating on services and programming.
“[CannonDesign and EDSA] bring to this project an understanding of whole health and how our environment and interactions influence our health and well-being,” said founder and philanthropist, Alice Walton, who recently dropped six figures into New York City’s mayoral race, backing groups opposed to Zohran Mamdani. “They’ve coupled that understanding with admiration for the beauty of the Ozark region and the collaborative spirit of our community, and channeled it into designs that enhance accessibility, connection, and ultimately wellness.”
The campus map shows how CannonDesign and EDSA plan to organize the parcel of land into a sequence of open landscapes threaded with trails, ponds, and shaded clearings. The Center for Advanced Specialty Care, the campus’s first building, will be situated at the northern edge.
The Center for Advanced Specialty Care is set to have two stepped volumes connected by a taller central structure. The facade will have horizontal bands of glass and wood-toned exterior elements and vertical fins. The rendering shows the building at the edge of a creek surrounded by trees in an effort to blend the campus into the existing landscape. The design team calls this “Living-Centered Design.”
The interior will have a high, coffered wood ceiling supported by wood columns. Floor-to-ceiling glazing, trees planted indoors and a central cafe or food-service counter are meant to blur the line between public and clinical space.
Arkansas-based Polk Stanley Wilcox Architects will join CannonDesign as the architects of record with construction managers Flintco and Nabholz and civil engineer Walter P. Moore.
The initial phase for the Bentonville Health Care Campus includes the Center for Advanced Specialty care, a parking structure, a utilities hub, and extensive gardens and trails. The project is targeting a December 2028 opening.
It’s an ambitious vision. The larger question is whether Bentonville’s built environment is evolving in step with its residents, or simply in line with the ambitions of those underwriting its growth.