Co-founded by Star Wars creator George Lucas and his wife, business leader Mellody Hobson, the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art has officially opened to the public in Los Angeles’s Exposition Park.
Years in the making, the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art centres on the idea of visual storytelling, bringing painting, illustration, comic art, photography, murals, film and popular-culture collections into a shared narrative. It invites visitors to reconsider how images tell stories across different eras and media.
The museum’s most striking feature is undoubtedly its sweeping form, which appears almost like a spacecraft touching down amid the city’s greenery. Designed by MAD Architects, led by Chinese architect Ma Yansong, with Stantec serving as executive architect, the approximately 300,000 sq ft building is defined by its organic, continuous and seemingly uplifted silhouette. Raised at its centre and meeting the ground at only a few points, the structure creates a distinctly light, hovering effect.
Rather than treating the building as an isolated sculptural object, MAD Architects drew inspiration from clouds, light and the surrounding tree canopy. The many curved panels that wrap the façade allow its volume to shift subtly with the sunlight and from different viewing angles. Its asymmetric composition, without a clearly defined front elevation, gives the museum the presence of a science-fiction object in perpetual motion — a fitting reflection of the imagination and fascination with the unknown that run through George Lucas’s cinematic world.
Set within a roughly 13-acre site, the museum does not present itself as a closed cultural institution. Landscape architect Mia Lehrer, founder of Studio-MLA, led the landscape design, transforming the spaces beneath and around the building into a public park designed for walking, pausing and gathering, with expansive lawns, winding pathways and lush planting.
Spanning five storeys, the museum comprises more than 30 galleries, two cinemas, a research library, retail space, a café, restaurant and event venues. Its exhibition spaces alone extend to more than 100,000 sq ft. More than a new cultural landmark created by the mind behind Star Wars, the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art is a defining example of MAD Architects’ ability to bring together futurism, organic form and public landscape. This ‘floating’ spacecraft above Los Angeles’s greenery proposes another possibility for museum architecture: one in which the building itself becomes a story to be entered, experienced and carried forward.
Photos: Hufton+Crow
