The futuristic Lucas Museum finally comes into focus
LOS ANGELES — It was chased out of Chicago by preservationists, only to become the object of a bidding war between Los Angeles and San Francisco. When George Lucas finally decided to build his $1 billion museum in Los Angeles, its arrival was jeered by some critics who saw it not as a civic gift but a vanity project. The museum is “a terrible idea,” wrote Christopher Knight, the art critic for the Los Angeles Times.
Since then, the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art has been beset by more delays: It is not expected to open until 2025, seven years after ground was first broken on a parking lot across the street from the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum with a promised 2021 opening.
But even in the haze of construction, a seemingly endless swirl of workers, cranes and girders, the enormous scope of the project is coming into focus as its futuristic new home rises in Exposition Park: a grand homage to one of the nation’s best-known filmmakers and a massive repository for his eclectic collection of 100,000 paintings, photographs, book illustrations and comic-book drawings.
Its huge expanse of curving gray metal hovers over the landscape like a low-flying spaceship, or perhaps the unfinished Death Star being built in “Return of the Jedi,” a fitting tribute to its namesake and patron, who created the “Star Wars” franchise. It stands five stories high, with enough gallery space to fill one and a half football fields, and it takes 15 minutes to walk across its sprawling campus.
“We are committed to creating an incredibly complicated building,” said Sandra Jacksondumont, the museum’s director, on a bright and beautiful Los Angeles afternoon as she led a visitor on a tour that, even after a full hour, did not cover all the corners and crannies of the building. “There isn’t a straight line in the whole place.”
On the one hand, the delays, the latest detours on the project’s long road to completion, are a result of a pandemic that has slowed projects across the nation.
But the slow pace is also evidence of the dramatic construction
and design ambitions brought to this legacy project by Lucas and his wife, Mellody Hobson, the co-chief executive
officer of the asset management firm Ariel Investments. That includes more than 1,500 individually fabricated curved
panels of fiberglass-reinforced polymer that make up the building’s shell, three starshiplike curved-glass elevators, an elliptical oculus, a rooftop garden dotted with full-grown trees and two 299-seat theaters, all resting on 281 seismic base isolators to protect the building — and its valuable collection of art — from a catastrophic earthquake.
The Lucas was designed by Ma Yansong, one of China’s most prominent architects; its gardens and parks were conceived by Mia Lehrer, the landscape architect.
“It’s fair to say that the ambition of it has contributed to the time it has taken,” said Michael Siegel, the executive architect. He noted, in particular, the burden of the unique panels. “So you have to design, engineer, fabricate all those extraordinary unique pieces and create a system for assembling them. It’s a monumentally complicated undertaking.”
Despite the name on the door and the pedigree, it will not be a museum devoted to Lucas’ film career. (If you want to see R2-D2, you can always head over to the new Academy Museum of Motion Pictures.) While the Lucas Museum will display some “Star Wars”related pieces and other parts of the Lucasfilm archive, it has broader aspirations.
It is, as its name suggests, a museum devoted to art that tells stories — a rather imprecise label that includes a mix of works by artists ranging from Norman Rockwell to Robert Crumb along with pieces by Frida Kahlo, Maxfield Parrish, Jacob Lawrence, Judy Baca and many, many others.
The Lucas Museum’s opening has been pushed back twice, to 2023 and then 2025, reflecting setbacks many projects have suffered during this era of work stoppages and supply-chain snags caused by the pandemic.
Lucas and Hobson, who live in Marin County in the Bay Area, ultimately settled on a part of Los Angeles that is often overshadowed by more familiar destinations like Hollywood and Santa Monica. That gives it its own stage as it seeks to make a mark on the civic landscape of Southern California.
In any event, it seem seems no corner has been cut and no cost spared. Museum officials said that funding from Lucas and Hobson accounted for any potential cost overruns caused by the pandemic or the complications of the design.
“We are not talking about costs, but I will say George and Mellody are committed to creating this museum,” said Jackson-dumont. “As a legacy project and also a commitment to art history.”
After all these years, people could be forgiven for wondering if this museum will ever be finished. But now, the more intriguing question is whether a project of this ambition can draw the crowds needed to fill its vast halls and escape becoming an intergalactic version of a white elephant.
Jackson-dumont came to Los Angeles after serving as the chair of the education department of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. She said she knew the project would be daunting before she arrived, but that the pandemic made it even more challenging than she could have imagined.
“I am not frustrated,” she said. “To open a building that is going to be a 200-year proposition, I think we should take a second to make sure we are getting things right — and getting it right when the entire world seems to be coming to pieces.”