BENTONVILLE, Ark. – (By Cynthia Lescalleet, Realty News Report) – A 350-acre setting for Walmart’s new headquarters is under construction in northwest Arkansas with a sustainable design plan by a Houston architect featuring office buildings with mass timber elements regionally produced from Southern yellow pine.
The retailer’s new home office campus in Bentonville, Ark., will replace the company’s 20 properties scattered in the area.
The 25-building development for 15,000 workers will incorporate office, retail and a hotel, as well as parking structures, fitness center, amphitheater, childcare facilities — and a lake. About half of the project acreage is slated for green space, with seven miles of hike and bike trails, including elements of the Razorback Regional Greenway.
In addition to embracing its natural setting and integrating public access for its adjacent community, the park-like project is currently the largest mass timber application in the U.S. It’s expected to use 1.7 million cubic feet of the engineered building material, noted for its sustainability as well as its aesthetics.
Gensler Houston’s Raffael Scasserra: Timber Produces Remarkable Workplace Environments
As executive architect on the project, Gensler’s Houston office is at the design helm of the overall project, which the client calls its “home office” rather than “campus.”
Gensler is also the design architect for the development’s 12 office buildings, which are slated to open at the pace of one a month through January 2026. Each one, four or five stories and flooded with natural light, has its own design personality, but all have a modular presence and mass timber interiors.
Gensler, a global architecture, design, and planning firm, is no stranger to mass timber’s applications. Its first such project in Texas was First United Bank in Fredericksburg in 2018, and the firm has continued to grow its expertise and project scale.
Gensler Houston principal Raffael Scasserra is design director of Walmart’s home office project.
He said the design process worked “from the inside out,” considering building functions both shared and unique. The site’s topography undulates, creating interesting sight lines and influencing building and amenity placements.
The design team also responded to how the client sought to better connect its workforce (called “associates”) for collaboration, to honor its heritage and presence in northwest Arkansas, and to follow design practices that incorporate sustainability and smart technology.
In support of the latter, using cross-grain mass timber for the building interiors was a deliberate choice. Lighter than steel, the renewable material’s properties include carbon reduction, fire resistance, strength, insulation, and use in biophilic design. That concept connects workers to the natural world for a healthier, more tranquil workplace.
“The environments it (mass timber) creates are remarkable,” Scasserra said.
As a design challenge, mass timber requires complex collaboration and coordination at the front end of a project between its planning, engineering, construction and operations teams. This is because each building’s mass timber kit is fabricated off-site. Its pieces are numbered for specific installation based on precise measurements for proper alignment of, for example, mechanicals.
Of note on the Walmart project is that much of the mass timber to be used is regionally produced from Southern yellow pine.
Lose The Fortress Vibe
On site, the project’s overall design incorporates a quadrant of distinct “neighborhoods” where buildings with related departments can work together and where a unique amenity or programming – such as the amphitheater or fitness center — further “blurs the boundaries” of work, play, stay, Scasserra said.
As corporate campus design goes, Walmart’s home office has flipped the remote fortress mentality of many company compounds. Rather than closing off the buildings and grounds from its adjacent community, Scasserra said, Walmart’s elements and infrastructure invite it in and through the development.
Scasserra said the project seems to be well-received so far by company associates using the already operating office buildings, Welcome Center, food hall, 360,000-square-foot fitness center and childcare facilities. “There’s a sense of pride…a new energy level,” he said.
Mass timber projects in the U.S. continue to gain traction. As of December 2024, the latest quarterly figures, there are 2,338 mass timber projects either under construction or complete, according to WoodWorks. The wood industry education and support resource for design, engineering and construction that has kept a tally of mass timber commercial, institutional and multifamily projects since 2013.
March 31, 2025 Realty News Report Copyright 2025
Images: Courtesy Walmart
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