Philadelphia Inquirer Misses the Mark on Bentonville Piece

In case you missed it, downtown Bentonville made national headlines (again) for its revitalization efforts.

This round, it was the Philadelphia Inquirer that ran a piece on Jan. 24 titled “A High-end Life in Walmart’s Hometown.”

If you haven’t read it yet, we can save you the trouble. Here’s the gist: “Arkansas backwater gets lots of cool stuff thanks to big, bad retail giant. And there’s even an art museum!” The sentiment was similarly expressed in pieces that ran in The New York Times and The Washington Post in the past year or so.

While we can forgive the Inquirer for not picking up on many of the nuances that have helped steer the area’s metamorphosis, we’re not sure we can so easily forgive this scathing description of the 21c Museum Hotel that made it into the piece: “At first glance, 21c appears to be another middle-of-the-road hotel and conference center in another middle-of-the-road American town,” he writes. “It’s boxy and boring, as though the architect used Legos to make a model, then decided to stick with it.”

This is not exactly how we’d describe the building designed by Deborah Berke, dean of the Yale School of Architecture, and a renowned thought leader in the field of modern architecture and design.

But that’s just us.