Architecture studio BIG has designed a series of buildings for a university being established by the members of the Walton family in Bentonville, Arkansas, USA with three structures that expand on the local vernacular.

Members of the Walton family, who are bets known as founders of retail giant Walmart, announced that BIG would design the campus on the site of the former Walmart Home Office. The company's new Gensler-designed corporate headquarters is being built nearby.

Billed as a STEM-focused university, the campus will have three significant buildings covering two city blocks, with 422,000 square feet (39,205 square metres) of space planned for the programme. Local studio Polk Stanley Wilcox Architects will serve as the architect of record.

One of the primary goals, according to BIG founder Bjarke Ingels, is the separation of boundaries between the research university and the public, opening up the buildings to create a sense of connection with the fast-growing community in Bentonville.

"The new STEM university in downtown Bentonville seeks to bridge the disconnect that often exists between academia and the working world around it," said Ingels.

"For the new campus, we have sought to break down the boundaries between campus and community through a lively new integrated neighborhood for faculty and citizens alike," he continued.

"We are honored to work with the Walton family on imagining the future academic environment for a new kind of urban university in the heart of Bentonville."

As seen in the renderings, the three primary buildings on the site will be distinct in form and function, united by an earth-toned colour generated in part by the planned use of weathering steel.

The three buildings will form an L, surrounding an outdoor space.

The Academic Building will feature a series of hipped connections at the slabs. Its facade will be covered in louvres, with alternating voids on the upper floors that bring additional light into a planned central atrium.

The alternation of forms and voids will create a stacking effect that was designed to reference the vernacular log structures of the region. It will also feature a breezeway meant to evoke the dogtrot typology common in the region.

Flanking the Academic Building on one side will be the Makerspace building, which will also deploys a stacking pattern.

However, instead of long stacked bars, it will have a series of stacked vitrines. On one side, the vitrines will be covered in slanted metal-mesh screens that give the building a cascading effect, while on the other, the glass of the vitrines will open up to the green space.

Meant to evoke the industrial, according to the studio, the approach to campus architecture is similar to the massed-pavilion structure BIG recently deployed at Johns Hopkins University in Maryland.

Finally, the campus will include a figure-eight-shaped building with a pleated facade and recessed windows oriented to mitigate solar gain. The windows will be recessed at different angles, which creates an interesting effect with the folds in the cladding.

As the building wraps around in its figure eight, it will create elevated courtyards in the recesses.

The university plan is the latest in world-class architecture in Bentonville, the majority of which is driven by the development efforts of the Walton family.

Recently, Safdie Architects completed an addition to the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in the city, on a campus that includes a health institute designed by Marlon Blackwell Architects, a long-time collaborator with the Walton family.

The imagery is courtesy of BIG.