LOS ANGELES — From scruffy Exposition Park in South Los Angeles, there is no missing the new Lucas Museum of Narrative Art.
It hovers like a spaceship on the skyline, at the park’s edge, snow white and ginormous. Its billowy, aerodynamic curves and swoops, capped by tufts of greenery, spill down to lavish gardens on what had been the site of a gated asphalt parking lot.
Design-wise, the museum’s galleries seem an afterthought, its circulation a puzzle. But this is one you won’t want to miss. Both surgically somber and proudly over the top, the Lucas is a weird kind of wonderful and an instant city landmark. It opened to the public Tuesday.
The 300,000-square-foot goliath was designed by prominent Chinese architect Ma Yansong and built to house the art collection of Star Wars filmmaker George Lucas and his wife, businessperson Mellody Hobson. The couple have picked up the project’s no-expense-spared tab: more than $1 billion.
That whopping sum has paid for more than 80,000 square feet of black-box exhibition space on the building’s fourth floor, where Luke Skywalker’s X-34 Landspeeder from Tatooine now idles in a Star Wars display.
Bridge-of-a-cruise-ship-style viewing ports at either end of the exhibition floor, and another in between, add pizazz and a respite from the gallery crawl.
Other rooms are devoted to Norman Rockwell paintings, manga art, motherhood, and love, among various folksy themes.
There are two state-of-the-art movie theaters, along with a shop and a cafe tucked into the building’s cinched podium. The roof, which has a restaurant, is a landscaped aerie of colorful plantings, winding paths, and sweeping vistas. A separate pavilion contains a library with arts and crafts furnishings, of all things, and a student center. A yellow Naboo N-1 Starfighter dangles from its lobby ceiling.
An artisan of biomorphic megastructures, Ma, who founded MAD Architects in Beijing, made his bones designing showstoppers including the Harbin Opera House in China and the Ordos Museum in the Gobi Desert. The Lucas Museum is his first major American cultural commission. Its arrival, across the street from the University of Southern California campus, where Lucas studied film, seems like destiny.
Lucas acquired his first work of art, a V.T. Hamlin Alley Oop comic, for a song in the 1970s. Over the decades his collection ballooned to include more than 40,000 works by famous comic artists and graphic novelists; film production designers and anime fabulists; golden-age American magazine illustrators and figurative painters of the 20th century such as Frida Kahlo and Thomas Hart Benton.
These were artists after Lucas’ own heart, naturally — fellow populists, visual virtuosos, and storytellers. Lucas came to believe modern art museums shortchanged or ignored them.
So he decided to build a cathedral to kindred spirits. He and Hobson first floated the idea to the Presidio in San Francisco in 2010. City officials there rejoiced at the prospect. But when the Presidio’s trustees balked, Lucas and Hobson looked to Chicago, Hobson’s hometown, hiring Ma to design a museum for a lakefront site.
Ma came up with a volcano-shaped design rising from the flat plains of the Windy City, which ran aground after a Chicago nonprofit parks preservation group sued, tying the project up in the courts.
After a second pass fizzled in the Bay Area, this time for a site on Treasure Island, Lucas and Hobson turned to Los Angeles.
By destiny I didn’t just mean that Lucas is synonymous with Hollywood. I mean that Los Angeles is also home to the Getty, the Huntington, the Norton Simon, the Hammer, and the Broad. Vanity museums, some of the most memorable on the planet, have been a big part of what makes the city’s cultural landscape so lively, diverse, and deep.
These institutions belong to a strain of American entrepreneurial individualism that has also given us the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia, Donald Judd’s Marfa spaces in Texas, and the Guggenheim in New York — go-it-alone ventures founded on contrarian principles. The Guggenheim proselytized the mystic healing powers of Wassily Kandinsky, Bach organ chorales, and incense.
The Lucas joins that company.
Its architectural goal was a blockbuster with contours inspired by trees and clouds, so as to blend into and anchor the edge of Exposition Park, alongside giants like Memorial Coliseum. The exterior is clad in 1,271 school-bus-size, hand-finished, fiberglass-reinforced polymer panels, combined like puzzle pieces, manufactured by a shipbuilding company in the Bay Area. Ma’s pièce de résistance is the museum’s central plaza: a four-story-high, 185-foot-wide arching gateway and oculus linking the neighborhood with Exposition Park.
A curator told me he has heard people compare the building to a sneaker. I’ve heard Angelenos talk about a mountain suddenly rising in South LA, and, of course, an Imperial Star Destroyer. It’s as svelte as an F1 car.
It is now the second museum to arrive this year and shake up the city’s architectural geography. Like the new Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Lucas also has civic ambitions. Tickets are $25, but anyone younger than 18 and/or living in the museum’s ZIP code, many of them low-income Angelenos, can enter free.
Footpaths and garden crossings, where that gated surface parking lot had been, aim to knit the area’s streets and sidewalks.
We’ll see how well those green spaces will be maintained, how open those neighborhood connections remain.
But it’s a safe bet that millions of children raised on their phones — who couldn’t care less about the definition of narrative art — will embrace the museum.
They’ll whoosh up and down the tubular glass elevators, run under the hanging gardens and across lawns devised by Mia Lehrer’s landscape team at Studio-MLA.
And be wowed by Ma’s architecture.
Who knows, some of them may even be inspired to put down those phones and pick up a pencil to draw.
This article originally appeared in the New York Times.
