A world-class STEM university is coming to small town Arkansas

A major STEM-focused university in the unlikely location of Bentonville, Arkansas, is starting to take shape. Announced in 2025, the university is the brainchild of brothers Tom and Steuart Walton, grandsons of Walmart founder Sam Walton and heirs to the massive wealth the company has created. A new design by one of the world’s most famous architects could help the project take shape, and accelerate the large-scale transformation happening across Bentonville. Initial renderings have just been released for the STEM university and a related master plan by the Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG), and they show a three-building campus spanning two city blocks and clad in rusty reds and copper. [Rendering: Bjarke Ingels Group] Featuring an academic building, a student residence, and a makerspace looking out on a public plaza, the buildings cover more than 420,000 square feet but keep a relatively low profile of about five stories in a part of town just outside the main core of downtown development. BIG founder Bjarke Ingels says the campus keeps open edges and attempts to blend into its neighborhood surroundings. [Rendering: Bjarke Ingels Group] “Architecturally and urbanistically the goals have been to tear down the barrier between the campus and the community, and to reconsider the STEM campus as an integrated neighborhood in Bentonville where you have academic buildings but you also have shops and cafes, workforce housing for residents and housing for students,” Ingels says. Slated to open in 2029, the project would be another major development in Bentonville, which has undergone a rapid and extraordinary transformation at the hands of the Walton family, starting with Alice Walton’s creation of the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, which opened in 2011 and recently expanded. [Rendering: Bjarke Ingels Group] Bentonville 2.0 On a recent visit to Bentonville, I sat down with Tom to talk about how such a university would fit into this small town, and h