The new Walmart headquarters in Bentonville, Arkansas was designed to offer all of the comforts workers enjoy at home in a centralized corporate location, an attempt at luring workers back to the office after the lull of COVID. The verdant 350-acre campus is the new global headquarters of Walmart. SWA was the landscape architect on the project and Gensler served as the building architect. Contemporary workplace design was forever changed by the pandemicand in many ways,the home office anticipated these changes, centering community-oriented design, indoor-outdoor connectivity, flexibility, and social cross-pollination, Gerdo Aquino, SWA co-CEO, said in a statement.The expansive campus has multimodal trails, among other amenities. ( David Lloyd/SWA)Walmart was founded in Bentonville in 1962, a corporation which inevitably grew into a multinational powerhouse synonymous with cheap consumer goods. Its old base of operations was an unassuming brick building, the Walmart Home office, also in Bentonville that the company had outgrown. Plans to upgrade the headquarters for Walmart personnel were first shared in 2017. Construction on the campus started in 2019 and concluded this year. Walmarts new headquarters accommodates 15,000 people in across 12 Gensler-designed buildings.Facade materials mimic exterior rock outcroppings. ( David Lloyd/SWA)Today at Walmart headquarters, employees circulate through a park-like campus with over 5,000 trees and enjoy multimodal trails ideated by SWA, but also constructed lakes, native and adaptive plantings, and bioswales that manage stormwater. A fitness center designed by Duda|Paine Architects is sited at the headquarters. And so is a childcare center by Page Architects, a hotel and welcome center by 5G Studio Collaborative and Book Powell, and a food hall by Miller Boskus Lack. Theres also a central conference and training hall.SWA also constructed small lakes for the verdant site. ( David Lloyd/SWA)The building exteriors feature expansive curtain walls that make for great viewing portals out to nature. Smoky red cladding makes up much of the opaque facade sections, which mimic the exterior rock outcroppings.Helen Walton Amphitheater ( David Lloyd/SWA)Likewise, locally sourced stone was used in outdoor amphitheater named after philanthropist Helen Walton. Sam Walton Hall is another space that pays tribute to Walmarts founders.Like many, Aquino added, we spent the past few years seeking solace in the outdoors and found extraordinary beauty in the landscapes where the Ozarks melt into lowland hills. That was really our jumping-off point: to instill feelings of rootedness, authenticity, and home by folding those ecosystems into the design.