The Ledger
CLOSEDanielle Kemble worked on this project as a member of the WeWork Ground Up Studio design team, prior to founding Out of Line.
A six-storey office building in downtown Bentonville, Arkansas, wrapped by a public concrete ramp that climbs the full height of the east facade. Riders enter from the street and carry on to the top-floor terrace without dismounting.
The ramp is the building's circulation and its public face at once. It crosses the east elevation in switchbacks, tying every floor to the street and giving each level its own frontage instead of routing everyone through a lobby and a lift core. Bentonville calls itself the mountain biking capital of the world, and the building takes that at its word: you arrive on the bike you rode there.
Stefan Sagmeister set glass mosaic insects into the concrete, crawling up through six floors toward an inscription on the top terrace that reads "Now is better." The parking structure alongside carries a pair of kinetic fish on its copper screen.
Copper wraps the ramp and the terrace edges, left to patinate rather than sealed. The floors step back as they rise, breaking the mass down toward the brick scale of the historic square, and a breezeway cuts through the ground floor to connect Main Street to the park behind.
