Futuristic design for George Lucas museum’s LA location unveiled

NFL teams often threaten to relocate to Los Angeles in order to try to get new home stadiums built. It's a tactic George Lucas has borrowed to get his Lucas Museum of Narrative Art built, most recently in Chicago. (Before that, he’d been rejected by San Francisco after suggesting the museum rise in the Presidio.)

Lucas gave up on building his museum in Chicago over the summer, and now he’s released renderings for the Lucas Museum in Los Angeles, at a spot in Exposition Park, west of the Coliseum, says the Los Angeles Times.

Perhaps as a way of hedging his bets, Lucas has at the same time released designs for the museum if it were to be built on San Francisco’s Treasure Island. In both locations, the museum has the support of each city’s mayors—Eric Garcetti in LA and Ed Lee in San Francisco.

Designs for both museums are by Chinese architect Ma Yansong (MAD Architects). They both look like space ships.

Courtesy of the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art

Lucas’s Los Angeles museum would include:

• underground parking for 1,800 cars (the museum’s construction would take out two surface parking lots)
• between 265,000 and 275,000 square feet of indoor space
• about 100,000 square feet of gallery space
• "shaded landscaping" underneath the new museum structure
• landscaped, public terraces on the roof level

The simultaneous reveal of designs for the Los Angeles and San Francisco locations on the same day is an "unusual" move, says the Times, but likely one informed rejection by his first choice (the San Francisco Presidio site) and the troubles that Lucas had trying to get the museum built in his second choice, Chicago, where he encountered strong pushback to his plan to build the museum in park space.

The dual-unveiling also "suggests that rather than feeling chastened enough by those prior defeats ... Lucas is instead growing ever more impatient to get a deal done."

• George Lucas' museum designs for L.A. and S.F.: a first look at competing plans [Los Angeles Times]
• George Lucas Officially Pulls Plug on Museum Plan for Chicago [Curbed Chicago]

Watch: Architecture that comes to life in Game of Thrones