DESIGN / LUCAS MUSEUM READY FOR LIFT-OFF IN LOS ANGELES

After 17 years of planning, rejected sites and construction delays, George Lucas’s $1-billion Lucas Museum of Narrative Art will open this September 22 in Exposition Park, giving Los Angeles a dramatic new landmark that appears ready to lift off. 

Designed by Ma Yansong and his Beijing firm, MAD Architects, the five-story, 300,000-square-foot building resembles a silver spacecraft hovering above an 11-acre park. Yansong says clouds and tree canopies—not “Star Wars”—inspired its sweeping form. 

Landscape architect Mia Lehrer transformed a former asphalt parking lot into gardens, paths and groves containing more than 200 trees. Inside are 100,000 square feet of galleries devoted to pictures that tell stories. Lucas (left) and his wife, Mellody Hobson, founded the museum to give illustration, comics, photography and cinematic design the standing traditionally reserved for fine art. 

Opening displays range from Norman Rockwell, Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera to Jack Kirby, Banksy, children’s illustration and manga. R2-D2, C-3PO, costumes, models and concept art appear in the cinema galleries, but Lucas’s film creations occupy only part of a collection exceeding 40,000 objects. 

The campus also includes two theaters, a research library, classrooms, a restaurant, café and public gathering spaces. Lucas began collecting art in the 1970s and pursued a museum for nearly two decades. His proposal for San Francisco’s Presidio failed to win approval. A later plan for Chicago’s lakefront collapsed amid a lawsuit. 

Los Angeles was selected in 2017, and construction began in 2018. An anticipated 2021 debut slipped because of the pandemic, supply-chain problems and the building’s complexity. 

Opening day will conclude a saga as persistent as Lucas’s films. More importantly, it will introduce his “people’s art” museum, built on the belief that a newspaper photograph, comic panel or movie costume can shape memory as powerfully as a painting.