Crystal Bridges Campus for Art and Wellness
Three renowned architecture firms – Marlon Blackwell Architects, Polk Stanley Wilcox Architects, Safdie Architects – create landmark buildings.
Envision strolling on a trail that leads you alongside a world-class museum of American art, past dozens of sculptures, serene ponds and streams, through Ozark woodlands and towards an Institute focused on advancing whole health.
You walk past a unique parking structure that incorporates water features and art installations, and over to an innovative School of Medicine, where you can explore its green roof and healing gardens.
In 2025, that experience will become a reality when Heartland Whole Health Institute and Alice L. Walton School of Medicine open on the campus of Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art.
Heartland Whole Health Institute, designed by Marlon Blackwell Architects of Fayetteville, Arkansas is inspired by the natural landscape of the Ozarks, particularly the bluffs, caves, rivers, forests, and fields present throughout the Northwest Arkansas region. The building’s composition is a mix of weathered brass fins and glass and stone cladding. The stone, also known as Giraffe Stone, is a vernacular building method found throughout the region, and the weathered brass fins are akin to the hardwood forests prominent in the Ozarks.
The fins help mitigate solar exposure of the interior spaces, while also creating a spatial experience like that of walking through the forest on a fall day. The building’s curvilinear forms respond to the sense of place of the Crystal Bridges Campus.
“Designed from the inside out and the outside in, Heartland Whole Health Institute is both a platform for and physical realization of the Institute’s mission to move health beyond illness treatment and into wholistic well-being,” said Marlon Blackwell and Ati Blackwell, founding Partners of Marlon Blackwell Architects. “Its spaces, materials, and forms, drawn from the site’s karst topography and Ozark forests, enhance the connection to nature and place. This new Institute provides an alternative approach to health care that unites art, architecture, wellness, and nature, forming an atmosphere to nurture the whole self.”
The openness of the building and direct access to the natural surroundings provides a nurturing environment for this organization that works with health care systems to adopt a whole health approach that considers the needs of the whole person with the goal of preventing disease, improving health outcomes, and sustaining wellness.
Visitors are invited into the building through a generous dogtrot, a passageway that runs through the center of the building and opens to a lawn with the forest beyond. Upon entering, visitors can view art in a gallery space, take a break at the café, or attend programs in the event spaces. The upper levels of this three-story, 85,000-square-foot building are dedicated to office space for the Institute and other non-profits founded by Walton, including Art Bridges Foundation and Alice L. Walton Foundation.
Blackwell’s deep understanding of the Crystal Bridges campus was enhanced by his design work within the museum, including the Museum Store (which received an American Institute of Architects Honor Award for Interior Design) and the museum’s restaurant, Eleven.
Read more about the full Crystal Bridges Campus, including Alice L. Walton School of Medicine and Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art here.