{"id":451291,"date":"2026-09-02T18:02:18","date_gmt":"2026-09-02T18:02:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/451291\/"},"modified":"2026-09-02T18:02:18","modified_gmt":"2026-09-02T18:02:18","slug":"lucas-museum-among-l-a-s-boldest-most-contradictory-buildings","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/451291\/","title":{"rendered":"Lucas Museum among L.A.\u2019s boldest, most contradictory buildings"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The first thing you notice when approaching the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art from afar is not its curved white shell or the bridge-like body that has long hovered in dreamlike renderings. You see green: a sloping crown of swirling grass rising above Exposition Park. For a moment, it looks as if a hill has appeared in the middle of Los Angeles.<\/p>\n

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Share via Close extra sharing options <\/p>\n

That impression shifts, again and again, as you get closer. The long, glacial structure\u2019s facade tightens, bends and twists. Its supports touch down like elephant feet, bolstering what could be a mammoth spacecraft, landing delicately next to the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. The building also reveals itself like a body: taut and contorting; bones and joints pressing up against skin. This evolving experience is theatrical enough that you can practically hear the music rising as you approach. But from certain angles, the edifice is just background, hard to register thanks to its sheer improbability; inviting a double take before you again grasp its startling futurism. It is a sneaky monument.<\/p>\n

Designed by Beijing-based MAD Architects to house George Lucas and Mellody Hobson\u2019s vast collection of narrative art, the more than $1 billion museum is among the boldest, most contradictory buildings this city has ever seen.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s synthetic yet organic, monumental yet welcoming, populist yet elitist. Its architecture conjures freedom and motion, but its galleries retreat into conventional rooms. It creates an extraordinary park, but fences and inaccessible surfaces weaken that generosity. It feels utterly foreign to its context, yet somehow it fits right in.<\/p>\n

In other words, it is the epitome of L.A.<\/p>\n

\"The <\/p>\n

The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art contains 11 acres of public parkland that is accessible from one hour before opening until dusk.<\/p>\n

(Eric Thayer \/ Los Angeles Times)<\/p>\n

Contradiction lies at the core of this city: beauty and glamour set against belching freeways and heavy industry; Kim Kardashian and Spencer Pratt juxtaposed with Joan Didion and Charles Bukowski; one of the most ethnically diverse regions in the world dotted with homogenous enclaves like Bel-Air and Malibu. And our identity \u2014 built or otherwise \u2014 has always been tangled up with fiction: fantasy bungalows, Googie coffee shops, Egyptian movie palaces, giant doughnuts and outdoor malls made to look like small-town Main Streets. Story is our reality. Divorced from context is the context.<\/p>\n

It only seems appropriate that this particular museum\u2019s origin story is an epic in its own right. Lucas, launching his quest in 2010, cycled through proposed sites in San Francisco and Chicago \u2014 each meeting with hardened opposition \u2014 before landing on L.A. The city offered a site in Exposition Park, just down the street from USC\u2019s School of Cinematic Arts, where Lucas first honed his craft.<\/p>\n

Lucas\u2019 selection of MAD to design his Chicago, and ultimately, Los Angeles museum, was a major plot twist. The firm\u2019s fluid, natural-inspired structures are as fearlessly strange as the filmmaker\u2019s previous building projects, including Skywalker Ranch, have been conservative. Founded by Ma Yansong, who is arguably the most recognized architect in China, MAD builds soaring, waterfall-shaped towers and boulder-like cultural parks, diving in and out of improbable man-made landscapes. In Chicago, MAD planned to create what looked like a billowing white mountain rising out of the pancake-flat plains of the Midwest.<\/p>\n

\"The <\/p>\n

The oculus at the entrance of The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art has a 90-foot diameter and floats four stories up. It serves as the central spot for orienting oneself inside the 300,000-square-foot museum.<\/p>\n

(Ariana Drehsler \/ For The Times)<\/p>\n

The L.A. version retains Chicago\u2019s core concept \u2014 a surreal, constructed landscape using thousands of tons of hidden engineering to conjure a shifting organic form. But it stretches it into a levitating, elongated shape: 700 feet long, 270 feet wide and five stories tall. The 300,000-square-foot building is carried by a dense web of steel beams, columns, trusses and outriggers, tightly skinned with more than 1,500 uniquely shaped, fiberglass-reinforced polymer panels. Its sides pinch inward near the ground before curving, mushroom-like, outward, making its upper body appear to float. These structural feats culminate at the building\u2019s center, where arched steel beams span 185 feet over a public plaza \u2014 opening to Expo Park and the neighborhood \u2014 to frame a 90-foot-diameter oculus, floating four stories up.<\/p>\n

Ma brings a happy zeal \u2014 and an artist\u2019s eye for detail \u2014 to creating a sense of wonder, fantasy and futuristic freedom in a world limited by boring, rational constraints. That feeling courses through the structure, from its shifting, beckoning profile and gee-whiz glass elevators, to a grand waterfall, nicknamed \u201cThe Rain,\u201d cascading from its north end. Softening curves embrace visitors and spark anticipation. Unique vantages \u2014 is that a giant hole in the roof? \u2014 alter any sense of normalcy. Oddness, and constant change, invite discovery \u2014 a kind of architectural storytelling that makes this an appropriate container for the narrative art inside.<\/p>\n

Ma also employs built imagination as a tool to reclaim nature from our concrete jungle. He couldn\u2019t have found a more appropriate site: 12 acres of surface parking that had severed much of its South L.A. neighborhood from Expo Park. The museum\u2019s deep weaving of architecture and landscape is its most tangible triumph. Los Angeles has stories to spare \u2014 and it should share them. But what the city really lacks is softness, shade and rejuvenating green relief.<\/p>\n

\"The <\/p>\n

The roof of the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art is covered with native greenery that looks from afar like a hill rising inside Exposition Park.<\/p>\n

(Eric Thayer \/ Los Angeles Times)<\/p>\n

MAD, with the help of landscape architect Mia Lehrer\u2019s Studio-MLA, has created a new piece of architectural topography which, counterintuitively, soars most when covered in dirt. Greenery becomes an artful layer, softening the building and giving it a sense of (literal) grounding that tech-adulating blobitecture often lacks. Wildflowers and sweeping fescue tangle atop the roof; soft pathways contour under, through and over built forms; green, tree-dotted slopes lend the museum\u2019s striated podium a sense that it\u2019s emerging, prairie-like, from the ground.<\/p>\n

Flowing like a natural outgrowth from this elevated base, the superb park\u2019s unique, interconnected sections take you on a rolling journey through California\u2019s peerless mix of landscapes \u2014 foothills, valleys, mesas, canyons and meadows, all conjured over the museum\u2019s underground parking. They are animated with flowers, grasses and trees, not to mention meeting spaces, fountains, hanging gardens and an amphitheater. From here the museum roof \u2014 half greenery, half solar panels \u2014 looms like a mountain, sloping down to the park via man-made foothills.<\/p>\n

The museum plaza\u2019s sweeping bridge creates a canopy of welcoming shade (inspired by Expo Park\u2019s own trees), which the city \u2014 particularly this part \u2014 desperately needs. Its warped, gridded undersides conjure a \u201cClose Encounters of the Third Kind\u201d vibe (sorry, George) to give the plaza a dazzling, otherworldly energy.<\/p>\n

Ma, like Lucas, evokes dreamlike scenography that heightens and shifts emotion through enveloping atmospheres. Despite a hail of criticism for the management of the museum \u2014 which has laid off more than 20 employees and seen its director, chief curator and director of public programs all leave \u2014 Lucas\u2019 choice of Ma to design his museum seems apt.<\/p>\n

Which is why it\u2019s frustrating that the museum\u2019s deepest disappointment resides where you might expect it to be most adventurous: inside its sprawling fourth-floor galleries. They feel safe in contrast to the exterior\u2019s lunging arcs and muscular motion; MAD\u2019s sense of daring and freedom limited to their periphery.<\/p>\n

\"The <\/p>\n

Sloping windows provide three different viewpoints into the city from inside the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art.<\/p>\n

(Ariana Drehsler \/ For The Times)<\/p>\n

The architectural decisions here make sense in a vacuum. Long, parallel avenues organize the space into legible districts \u2014lending order to the swirling movement \u2014 with the oculus serving as a useful center of orientation. Curved walls trace the building\u2019s edges while exhibits are divided into 35 thematic spaces. Movable partitions and lighting grids allow the rooms and their extensive technical infrastructure to be continually rearranged.<\/p>\n

But it feels too sensible. A safe, familiar exhibition system inserted into a gutsy, otherworldly context. Phenomenal energy, and the world outside, cocooned behind high-grade drywall. Art requires some neutrality to find its voice, but a building dedicated to the exploration of narrative shouldn\u2019t stop exploring just when its storytelling begins.<\/p>\n

The first-floor galleries, introducing visitors to narrative art via a hodgepodge of reproduced examples through the ages, are worse: a vague approximation of MAD\u2019s sinuous language, performed with little of its finesse. This detachment from the overall concept makes you wonder if the museum\u2019s constant turnover affected the teams working on interior and exhibition designs. Or if leadership got seduced by silhouette, movement and atmosphere, neglecting to marry the galleries to the overall concept.<\/p>\n

Beyond these galleries the museum\u2019s momentum returns, whisking you back to a realm of improbable mesmerizing encounters. Looking down from the steep glass enclosure wrapping the ethereal oculus is like peering down from a cliff. Smooth plaster tunnels extending from the gallery edges lead you, like portals to another world, to three respite-providing viewing points. Their sweeping glass, jutting forward, teleports you outside the site, cinematically reframing the immediate surroundings, and the city.<\/p>\n

In the upper level\u2018s murals gallery, the roof\u2019s steep, angular geometry can\u2019t be suppressed, forcing the lighting grid to skew into a kind of mechanical sky \u2014 a unique spatial experience itself.<\/p>\n

1 <\/p>\n

\"The <\/p>\n

2 <\/p>\n

\"A <\/p>\n

1. The oculus at the entrance of the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art. (Ariana Drehsler \/ For The Times) 2. A drone view of the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art. (Eric Thayer \/ Los Angeles Times) <\/p>\n

In the lobby, concave walls bend around you to create fluid motion; a sensation heightened by two banks of mysterious tubular glass elevators. These keep the space visually open while becoming a show in themselves: You can see visitors rising and falling, like commuters in \u201cThe Jetsons,\u201d or take a ride yourself, the cavernous space constantly rearranging itself around you.<\/p>\n

Two identical theaters flanking the lobby are galleries in their own right. Concentric circles of wedge-shaped acoustic panels diminish as they rise, creating a vortex overhead. Uplighting causes the dark panels to look like pillows, making the rooms feel soft and cosmic, as if the audience might be gently sucked into both the screen and the ceiling.<\/p>\n

\"A <\/p>\n

The library, full of Arts and Crafts furniture, is open to the public without a reservation, similar to the park and gardens. <\/p>\n

(Ariana Drehsler\/For The Times)<\/p>\n

The education and research wing has its own entrance across the main plaza, with a yellow Naboo Royal N-1 Starfighter hanging from its lofty lobby ceiling. Its research library is a warm space anchored by a prow-like window wall, the garden extending to the horizon. But its dark wood and Arts and Crafts furniture \u2014 an ode to the library of Skywalker Ranch \u2014 is an awkward fit with Ma\u2019s futurism.<\/p>\n

Even that small miss captures another great symbiosis between Lucas and Ma. Both are craftsmen, interested in immediate emotional response over esoteric scholarly unpacking. Both draw on a kind of distant mythology, and forces (or just the Force) uniting humanity and nature, but conceal their intellectual machinery behind imagined worlds.<\/p>\n

\"A <\/p>\n

A statue of Yoda and Grogu on the museum\u2019s grounds.<\/p>\n

(Ariana Drehsler \/ For The Times)<\/p>\n

Lucas\u2019 art collection, collapsing the distance between high and low brow, is a refreshing alternative to most museums\u2019 academically approved fare. It taps into your core via fine art, sculpture and installation, but also comics, films, manga, children\u2019s illustrations and animation. In the park, statues of Yoda and Jabba the Hutt layer the serene grounds with Lucas\u2019 eccentric cinematic invention. Seeing Jabba from one of the museum\u2019s overlooks made me laugh. This kind of showmanship, however corny, captures the democratic affection that people have for Lucas and his worlds.<\/p>\n

This serves to highlight the museum\u2019s other major disappointment: a spatial elitism that belies what is generally a populist museum. For now, you can\u2019t wander over the museum\u2019s sloping roof or walk atop most of its raised base, as the imagery of a walkable hill suggests. Rooftop event spaces that let you look over the city and stare down into the oculus are for now reserved only for private functions. The lovely Skywalker Grill\u2019s <\/a>terrace and planted overlooks, with views as far as downtown L.A., will be tied to that restaurant; mostly closed to those without a reservation.<\/p>\n

While the museum effectively uses softness to connect its site, it does not reach out to its immediate surroundings in the same way. The lack of shade trees along the building\u2019s perimeter are decidedly unfriendly. Much of the site meets the city through fences \u2014 and not very inspired ones at that. Even the softened base is fronted by dark gray walls, which are especially noticeable on the museum\u2019s western, neighborhood side.<\/p>\n

Like Disneyland, the Chinese Theater or any of L.A.\u2019s invented wonders, the museum is most convincing when its fiction produces something real: energy, mystery, curiosity; shade, landscape, public space; welcome, accessibility and inclusiveness. It fails when it loses the link to its core generosity and creativity, in its galleries, on its walkable surfaces, and on its edges. And while the building is a breathtaking break from reality, a little more of L.A.\u2019s improvised, scrappy texture might have made it feel less slick \u2014 grounding it in the city as well as the earth.<\/p>\n

\"The <\/p>\n

The murals gallery at the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art provides views of the organic shape of the building\u2019s roof.<\/p>\n

(Ariana Drehsler \/ For The Times)<\/p>\n

Still, this is not a building that should worry too much about fitting in. Strangeness has never been an issue in open-minded Los Angeles. Where the city can learn from Lucas is how the museum (mostly) creates coherence through landscape. Greenery has been the unifier in Southern California all along, yet we have chosen to disconnect this idyllic place with hardness and chaos.<\/p>\n

Which puts a spotlight on the embarrassing disorder of Expo Park itself (despite valiant efforts from its current leadership<\/a>, including a parking lot soon to be turned into a park near BMO Stadium). Across the street from the Lucas Museum, the greenery fronting the Natural History Museum is ripped up and trashed. Other approaches are scorched stretches of concrete begging to become soft, shaded connectors. Greenery is often stuck behind gates and around parking lots. Distinguished, and wealthy, institutions continue to behave like isolated compounds \u2014 a reflection of Los Angeles at large.<\/p>\n

The Lucas Museum can\u2019t make Exposition Park, much less Los Angeles, magically cohere. But descending from that fake hill reminds you of the museum\u2019s most resonant narrative: the possibility of a softer, greener, more joined and generous city, alive to possibility. A fantasy made useful.<\/p>\n

\"The <\/p>\n

The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art is set to open Sept. 22 and is the culmination of more than 15 years of planning on the part of co-founders George Lucas and Mellody Hobson.<\/p>\n

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