This article is part of Ma Yansong's monograph included with the December issue of Domus, 1107.
The impressive construction site of the new Lucas Museum of Narrative Art in Los Angeles will be brought to completion in less than a year, allowing the museum to welcome visitors on 22 September 2026.
Founded by the movie director George Lucas, who is also “head of content direction”, and his wife, the business executive Mellody Hobson, the museum is dedicated to art forms rooted in visual and literary storytelling.
Lucas’s personal collection of 40,000 items will be on display – illustrations, paintings, photographs, comic strips, mural art and Star Wars props. In 2014, MAD won the competition to design the building, which broke ground in 2018 with Michael Siegel from Stantec as the executive architect.
The 11-hectare site is a former asphalt parking lot in Exposition Park, Los Angeles, a major location for the city’s culture- and sports-related pastimes. Other important institutions here are the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County and the California African American Museum. The Park will host facilities for the 2028 Summer Olympics, as it did for the Games in 1984 and 1932. The Lucas Museum aims to be a destination for local communities and visitors of the Park’s other attractions, both permanent and temporary.
We were inspired by the big trees at Exposition Park. They are used as havens and meeting places. We modelled the building as a kind of extension of their canopies, lifting the middle part to host a space for gathering.
MAD
Its configuration is a single curvilinear volume, functionally and visually suspended above an intricate system of mineral- and plant-based public spaces. The five-storey, 28-thousand-square-metre building offers 10 thousand square metres of gallery space. In addition there are two movie theatres, event spaces, a library and learning space, a cafe, a restaurant and a shop. The main entrances are positioned off a covered plaza overhung by the building sitting on arched steel beams with a span of 56 metres. An elliptical oculus pierces the overlying bridge, flooding the plaza with light from above.
“We were inspired by the big trees at Exposition Park. They are used as havens and meeting places,” say the MAD designers. “We modelled the building as a kind of extension of their canopies, lifting the middle part to host a space for gathering.”
The sculptural curvaceousness of the Lucas Museum evokes the kind of science fiction imagery that George Lucas contributed to popularising. On a technical level, the spaceship-like building is clad with 1,500 panels of fibreglass-reinforced polymer, each differently shaped, which is typical of today’s exuberant architecture based on parametric design. The complexity of the built volumes continues in the park.
Mia Lehrer, the landscape architect founder of Studio-MLA in Los Angeles, has conceived the surroundings as a biodiverse, sustainable surface equipped with paths, reflection ponds and a range of landscape features that extend over the robust mound of the building itself.