8th & Plate Food Hall
Client: Walmart
Time Period: 2018 – 2024
Role: Architect
Size: 80,700 SF
The recently completed 8th & Plate Food Hall is located at the heart of Walmart’s new corporate campus in Bentonville, AR. MBL Architecture designed the 80,000 SF facility to host 12 different serveries and provide seating capacity for 1,600 associates. An additional 9,000 SF of covered porches promotes ample outdoor seating, especially during Northwest Arkansas’ famed shoulder seasons.
Given the brief to design a food hall that would serve as the ‘heart’ of campus for associate gathering, MBL’s first move was to create a basement level for kitchens, mechanical spaces and loading docks. The decision to bury 33,000 SF of kitchen and 12,000 SF of loading docks – a design choice that required infrastructure upgrades and careful planning to manage the constant flow of large trucks that supply the food hall – created a ground level building fully focused on providing a world-class associate experience. Crucially, the move also allowed for the elimination of visible loading docks and bunker-like back-of-house spaces at ground level. Instead, this created an opportunity for exterior dining porches along all sides of the building.
The porches on the north façade align 8th Street, the main campus thoroughfare, and reinforce the urban and pedestrian focused nature of the campus plan. South and east facing porches view directly into the ‘green groove’, a forested swathe which cuts across campus, helping to reinforce the building’s connection to nature, another guiding principle of the master plan.
At ground level, the building consists of two simple, double-height brick volumes joined by a metal clad entry lobby. Wood soffits at the porches lining the building enhance the material palette and evoke the iconic residential porch spaces in Northwest Arkansas vernacular architecture. Large skylights fill the interior with natural light, while the serveries are pops of color and texture which serve to differentiate the various offerings and provide a welcome contrast to the humble nature of the exterior.
