The panels adorn a structure that is five stories high, white and with a shape that can only be described as bulbous. The 300,000-square-foot museum was designed to look like a spaceship and was 17 years in the making.<\/p>\n
The building is surrounded by over 10 acres of green. Those who stroll the grounds can share in a high-drama feminist moment via a sculpture memorializing Carrie Fisher\u2019s Princess Leia in her metal bikini choking Jabba the Hutt to death, a scene from 1983\u2019s \u201cReturn of the Jedi.\u201d<\/p>\n
Of course, there\u2019s all kinds of other artwork on display in the five-story museum\u2019s interior, including works by Banksy and, in what some might describe as a visual oxymoron, Norman Rockwell.<\/p>\n
![\"Visitors](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/LUCAS1.jpg\")
Visitors attend the sold-out opening day of the new Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, a 300,000-square-foot structure in Exposition Park, in Los Angeles.. Founded by filmmaker George Lucas and wife Mellody Hobson and designed by the architect Ma Yansong, it is billed as the “first museum dedicated to the universal human tradition of visual storytelling.” The long-awaited institution is integrated into an 11-acre campus. (Photo by Mario Tama\/Getty Images)<\/p>\n
And those who view the exterior, which, of course, a visitor can\u2019t help but do, can reflect on the fact that sometimes, beauty really is skin-deep \u2014 in the case of the museum\u2019s fa\u00e7ade, anyway.<\/p>\n
Architect Ma Yansong of MAD Architects designed the building with a continuous curved surface across five stories. There are no right angles. Each of the panels, which measure around five or six feet wide and as long as 30 feet, occupies a unique position in the geometry.<\/p>\n
Each panel was uniquely shaped and manufactured through a process that combines milling, robotic scanning, and hand-finishing. The completed panels were shipped to Los Angeles and installed.<\/p>\n
Henry Ford, often called the father of the assembly line, would probably be impressed by the setup at Kreysler\u2019s Mare Island facility.<\/p>\n
Machines cut a foam mold for each panel; resin was injected into each mold and allowed to harden; robotic arms scanned, trimmed, and finished each piece.<\/p>\n
You might think creating a fa\u00e7ade for a building with no right angles located 385 miles away was enough of a challenge. But no. The building sits on 281 seismic base isolators, each a steel bowl with a ball bearing designed to let the structure move from side to side during an earthquake.<\/p>\n
Conventional panels would have added too much weight to the building, impacting the isolation system\u2019s ability to move quickly. So the designers switched to glass fiber-reinforced plastic, which is lighter.<\/p>\n
Among other projects, Kreysler also created the fa\u00e7ade for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the oculus for the Broad Museum in downtown Los Angeles.<\/p>\n
Tim Oliver, president of project development for Kreysler, said he and his company were \u201cthrilled\u201d to have contributed to the building.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe were unable to make it down for the opening \u2013 we\u2019re a little caught up in our current work,\u201d Oliver said. He said he \u201cabsolutely\u201d intends to visit the museum as soon as he can.<\/p>\n
\u201cKreysler & Associates is extremely proud of the role we played in the realization of this remarkable building,\u201d said William Kreysler, the firm\u2019s president.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The fa\u00e7ade of \u201cStar Wars\u201d filmmaker George Lucas\u2019 billion-dollar Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, which officially opened Tuesday…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":859534,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[52],"tags":[228,2356,88,2558,983,206,3,4910,5413,7234,10842,2628,27233],"class_list":["post-859533","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-arts","tag-california","tag-entertainment","tag-latest-headlines","tag-local-news","tag-movies","tag-news","tag-newsletter","tag-north-bay","tag-northern-california","tag-solano-county","tag-things-to-do","tag-vallejo"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/859533","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=859533"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/859533\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/859534"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=859533"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=859533"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=859533"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}