Ma Yansong’s Design For The Lucas Museum Is Built To Make You Look Up

The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art opened to the public in Los Angeles’ Exposition Park on September 22, after a search for a home that has taken George Lucas through several cities.

Founded by Lucas and Mellody Hobson, the museum is dedicated to storytelling through images, from prehistoric cave paintings to comics, cinema and murals, with more than 1,300 works across more than 30 galleries.

All of this sits within a 300,000-square-foot building by Ma Yansong of MAD Architects, which manifests in a white, curving form, designed without a single straight line, that lifts off the ground at its centre.

Speaking to Hypebeast ahead of the public opening on the 22nd, a self-described “little bit sleepless” Ma said the finished building still caught him off guard.

“When you’re walking in it, it feels very big – bigger than any picture,” he says. “I feel the building is a little bit scaleless. From an image, or from the sky, it doesn’t look so big. But when you arrive at the plaza, that’s when you feel its size.”

That experience, he explains, is something no render can prepare you for. “This building doesn’t have one view. It’s hard to find a main elevation where you can see everything at once. I’ve visited the construction many times, but it’s still quite unique for me.”

MAD’s part in the story began 12 years ago in Chicago, where Lucas invited five or six practices to compete. MAD was the youngest office in the running, and the only one from Asia.

“I really wanted to win,” Ma says, recalling a period around two or three weeks before the deadline of a roughly two-and-a-half-month competition, when he threw the scheme away and started again.

Chicago, he reasoned, was the home of modern architecture. Here, buildings are treated as monumental objects. His new proposal went the other way: white, volcano-like forms that melted into the lakefront landscape, blurring the line between park and building. Lucas, Ma says, made his mind up before the presentation had finished. “He said, ‘I like this. I want this.’”

MAD spent two years developing the structure and materials before a lawsuit over the lakefront site stalled the project. Even the late Frank Gehry published an open letter in a Chicago newspaper in its support, but eventually. Lucas withdrew. “We were heartbroken,” says Ma.

Around six months later, Lucas came back with a new brief: submit a design for Los Angeles and San Francisco simultaneously, with either one capable of becoming a “world landmark”.

In Los Angeles, Ma found his cue in the natural landscape, large tree canopies and clouds – “formless, organic, very mysterious”.

The heart of the scheme is the public plaza beneath the building. The structure touches the ground at only a few points, and its central arch spans 185 feet, connecting the museum’s north and south lobbies and acting as a gateway into the park. Four storeys above, an elliptical oculus frames the sky – an element that Ma describes as “spritual”.

“People start to look up and put down their phone,” he adds. “I think there’s a spiritual atmosphere, which is an important quality for a public space.”

Lucas, who toured friends through the building before completion, reported back that some visitors cried on arriving in the plaza. “That’s when I started to understand how, when we talk about emotional architecture, this abstract space can communicate with people,” says Ma.

Ma traces his design inspiration to two early loves: science fiction, including Lucas’ films, and classical Chinese art and gardens, where nature and built structures are composed into a journey. “In the modern city, the building becomes dominant and nature becomes secondary,” he says. “I thought, why don’t we blur this boundary?”

That mix of the unfamiliar and the historical is, Ma thinks, what Lucas responds to. “He travels between all these different civilisations. He likes classical architecture, but he also likes to create something totally new that nobody has seen before,” he says. “When we show him something with a new appearance, but with a connection to nature and something classical underneath, he’s interested. He likes to see something a little stranger.”

At a press preview earlier this month, Lucas described himself as a contrarian, saying: “I’m fascinated by doing things that people say can’t be done.” Ma reads that as an emotional ambition more than a technical one. “Normally, when you look at a building, you see the material, the structure, a container for functions. He wants the first reaction to be emotion,” he says. The same thinking runs through the galleries, where wall labels give only an artwork’s title and year, with no interpretation.

Later in our conversation, Ma explains the moment he realised that his connection to Lucas’ work runs deeper than he thought.

Lucas invited MAD to compete after seeing its Ordos Museum in Inner Mongolia, a reflective metal shell set on a desert-like landscape. Ma had been inspired by a film scene of a silver spaceship in the desert, but couldn’t remember which film it was from. As it happens, it later discovered it was an early Star Wars movie. “He didn’t know it had anything to do with his work,” Ma says. “I didn’t know either.”

Of course, this project wasn’t completed by Ma alone. Realising the curves took a team of more than 150 architects, engineers and designers. The exterior is clad in more than 1,200 panels of fiberglass-reinforced polymer, each uniquely shaped, with glass, metal and concrete inside all bent to meet one another precisely. “It’s a bit like making an aircraft,” says Ma.

The Lucas Museum sits in a line of MAD projects, from Ordos to the Phoenix Center in Beijing, that set something unfamiliar against its surroundings. The inaugural exhibitions acknowledge this with an installation of Ma’s drawings, renderings and photographs, presenting him as a narrative artist in his own right. “I like science fiction landed on reality,” he says. “Not totally abstract, not Avatar – something super new that can come to our reality.”