A Commons for Culture and Ecology

In collaboration with the City of Fayetteville and a broad team of consultants, NBW led the design of The Ramble, a transformative landscape project connecting the city’s natural heritage with its cultural institutions. Spanning more than ten acres between the Arts District and the ecologically sensitive Tanglewood Branch parallel to the Razorback Greenway, The Ramble serves as both an environmental restoration initiative and a civic corridor, knitting together cultural assets, urban streetscapes, and a revitalized stream corridor.

Divided into the Upper and Lower Ramble, the project integrates sustainable solutions throughout. Descending southward, the wilder Lower Ramble restores the Tanglewood Branch stream corridor and its surrounding forest, Fay Jones Woods. Once degraded by urban runoff and invasive species, the woodland has undergone extensive ecological restoration, including native revegetation, daylighting of piped stream sections, and structural reinforcements to stabilize its banks. The Canopy Walk, an elegant, accessible boardwalk, spirals through the treetops before bringing visitors to the stream’s edge, where stone terraces offer spaces for reflection and engagement with the Ozark ecosystem.

Where the Lower Ramble engages the steep terrain of an ecologically rich steam corridor and forest, The Upper Ramble features a more mineral experience with a civic plaza that transforms a decades old asphalt parking lot into an urban oasis connecting the urban core and the larger ecological network. The plaza, a new civic hub for community gathering, arts, and festivals across from the Walton Arts Center and TheatreSquared, centers the site’s hydrological story by channeling the once-buried Tanglewood Branch Spring into an elongated fountain providing a visual, aural, and tactile experience.

Enhanced streetscapes were built with permeable paving and curbside rain gardens, mitigate stormwater runoff before it reaches the valley below. 

Through its selection as a Walton Family Foundation Design Excellence Program project and a bond measure approved by city voters, The Ramble is the result of years of community engagement, where residents helped shape this new public realm. More than just a park, it is a living restoration project that blends civic space with ecological stewardship. As the city’s mayor declared at the groundbreaking, “Don’t you just love this city?”