Institute building named to WSJ’s “The Best Architecture of 2025” list

The Best Architecture of 2025: Place Over Pizzazz

The year’s best buildings, including the new headquarters of JPMorgan Chase and the revamped Frick Collection, didn’t deploy flashy styles, instead smartly and sensitively embracing their specific settings.

The Heartland Whole Health Institute in Bentonville, Ark., also responds to its rural setting in poetic rather than literal terms. Alice Walton, of the family that founded Walmart, having already created the spectacular Crystal Bridges Museum and given the Ozarks a medical school, decided to complete her trifecta of architectural patronage with a new kind of institution devoted to public health. Its role, as its mission statement declares, is to work “with the health care industry in developing a whole-health approach that considers the needs of the whole person with the goal of preventing disease, improving health outcomes, and sustaining wellness.” To that end she engaged Marlon Blackwell Architects to design the 85,000-square-foot HWHI.

Although it is essentially an office building, it looks nothing like one. Mr. Blackwell told me that his guiding idea was that of “the cave and forest,” a structure that addresses the earth beneath it, firmly and intimately, and then rises skyward like a living thing. Its interior is adroitly arranged to put the working spaces in the center so that no one is far removed from nature and sunlight, and views of the Ozark landscape—a demonstration of Ms. Walton’s insistence that well-being is just as much psychological as physical. Read the full article here.