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    "original_url": "https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2026\/09\/17\/arts\/design\/lucas-museum-los-angeles-star-wars.html?emc=edit_nn_20260918&nl=the-morning&segment_id=226681",
    "parsed_content": "critic\u2019s notebookWeird and Wonderful, the Lucas Museum Lands in L.A.A billion-dollar behemoth that looks like a spaceship houses the art collection of the \u201cStar Wars\u201d filmmaker George Lucas and his wife, Mellody Hobson. It\u2019s an instant landmark.Credit...By Adam Amengualcritic\u2019s notebookWeird and Wonderful, the Lucas Museum Lands in L.A.A billion-dollar behemoth that looks like a spaceship houses the art collection of the \u201cStar Wars\u201d filmmaker George Lucas and his wife, Mellody Hobson. It\u2019s an instant landmark.Credit...By Adam AmengualSupported bySKIP ADVERTISEMENTListen \u00b7 6:55 min Share full articleBy Michael KimmelmanMichael Kimmelman checked in on construction of the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art over the years and recently returned to Los Angeles to see the finished building.Sept. 17, 2026From scruffy Exposition Park in South Los Angeles, there is no missing the new Lucas Museum of Narrative Art.It hovers like a spaceship on the skyline, at the park\u2019s edge, snow white and ginormous. Its billowy, aerodynamic curves and swoops, capped by tufts of greenery, spill down to lavish gardens on what had been the site of a gated asphalt parking lot.ImageThe Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, with its viewing port window on the gallery floor, overlooks new parkland.Credit...Jake Michaels for The New York TimesDesign-wise, the museum\u2019s galleries seem an afterthought, its circulation, a puzzle. But this is one you won\u2019t want to miss. Both surgically somber and proudly over the top, the Lucas is a weird kind of wonderful and an instant city landmark. It opens to the public on Sept. 22.AdvertisementSKIP ADVERTISEMENTThe 300,000-square-foot goliath was designed by the prominent Chinese architect Ma Yansong and built to house the art collection of the \u201cStar Wars\u201d filmmaker George Lucas and his wife, the businesswoman Mellody Hobson. The couple have picked up the project\u2019s no-expense-spared tab: more than $1 billion.That whopping sum has paid for more than 80,000 square feet of black-box exhibition space on the building\u2019s fourth floor, where Luke Skywalker\u2019s X-34 Landspeeder from Tatooine now idles in a \u201cStar Wars\u201d display.Bridge-of-a-cruise-ship-style viewing ports at either end of the exhibition floor, and another in between, add pizazz and a respite from the gallery crawl.The Museums Special SectionRocky, Reconsidered: The sculpture is at the center of a show by the Philadelphia Museum of Art\u00a0that explores the meaning of monuments.Route 66 Turns 100: Exhibitions recall the history of the neon corridor that helped define the American road trip.A New Museum Comes With a D.J.: The space in Indianapolis, housed in a former dairy barn, aims to upend expectations of what an art museum can be.The Fisher Collection in a New Light: A Bay Area family made a deal with SFMOMA\u00a0that called for exhibitions of the collection\u2019s works every 10 years.More on Museums: Artists and institutions\u00a0are adapting to changing times.Ma Yansong's architecture is full of futuristic gestures like this viewing port window that looks out over the new gardens and lawns by Studio-MLA..Credit...Jake Michaels for The New York Times Other rooms are devoted to Norman Rockwell paintings, manga art, motherhood and love, among various folksy themes.AdvertisementSKIP ADVERTISEMENTThere are two state-of-the-art movie theaters, along with a shop and a cafe tucked into the building\u2019s cinched podium. The roof, which has a restaurant, is a landscaped aerie of colorful plantings, winding paths and sweeping vistas. A separate pavilion contains a library with Arts and Crafts furnishings, of all things, and a student center. A yellow Naboo N-1 Starfighter dangles from its lobby ceiling.The museum includes two state-of-the-art movie theaters and tubular elevators straight out of sci-fi. Credit...Jake Michaels for The New York Times An artisan of biomorphic mega-structures, Ma, who founded MAD Architects in Beijing, made his bones designing showstoppers like the Harbin Opera House in China and the Ordos Museum in the Gobi Desert. The Lucas Museum is his first major American cultural commission. Its arrival, across the street from the University of Southern California campus, where Lucas studied film, seems like destiny.Lucas acquired his first work of art, a V.T. Hamlin \u201cAlley Oop\u201d comic, for a song in the 1970s. Over the decades his collection ballooned to include more than 40,000 works by famous comic artists and graphic novelists; film production designers and anime fabulists; golden-age American magazine illustrators and figurative painters of the 20th century like Frida Kahlo and Thomas Hart Benton.These were artists after Lucas\u2019s own heart, naturally \u2014 fellow populists, visual virtuosos and storytellers. Lucas came to believe modern art museums shortchanged or ignored them.So he decided to build a cathedral to kindred spirits. He and Hobson first floated the idea to the Presidio in San Francisco in 2010. City officials there rejoiced at the prospect. But when the Presidio\u2019s trustees balked, Lucas and Hobson looked to Chicago, Hobson\u2019s hometown, hiring Ma to design a museum for a lakefront site.AdvertisementSKIP ADVERTISEMENTGalleries with temporary walls hung from an exposed ceiling; colorful plantings on the rooftop; the entrance to the library wing, custom designed for a Naboo N-1 Starfighter.Credit...Jake Michaels for The New York Times Ma came up with a volcano-shaped design rising from the flat plains of the Windy City, which ran aground after a Chicago nonprofit parks preservation group sued, tying the project up in the courts.After a second pass fizzled in the Bay Area, this time for a site on Treasure Island, Lucas and Hobson turned to Los Angeles.By destiny I didn\u2019t just mean that Lucas is synonymous with Hollywood. I mean that Los Angeles is also home to the Getty, the Huntington, the Norton Simon, the Hammer and the Broad. Vanity museums, some of the most memorable on the planet, have been a big part of what makes the city\u2019s cultural landscape so lively, diverse and deep.These institutions belong to a strain of American entrepreneurial individualism that has also given us the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia; Donald Judd\u2019s Marfa spaces in Texas, and the Guggenheim in New York \u2014 go-it-alone ventures founded on contrarian principles. The Guggenheim proselytized the mystic healing powers of Wassily Kandinsky, Bach organ chorales and incense.AdvertisementSKIP ADVERTISEMENTThe Lucas joins that company.Its architectural goal was a blockbuster with contours inspired by trees and clouds, so as to blend into and anchor the edge of Exposition Park, alongside giants like Memorial Coliseum. The exterior is clad in 1,271 school-bus-size, hand-finished, fiberglass-reinforced polymer panels, combined like puzzle pieces, manufactured by a shipbuilding company in the Bay Area. Ma\u2019s pi\u00e8ce de r\u00e9sistance is the museum\u2019s central plaza: a four-story-high, 185-foot-wide arching gateway and oculus linking the neighborhood with Exposition Park.ImageAn arching central plaza, under an oculus, links Exposition Park to the neighborhood next door.Credit...Jake Michaels for The New York TimesA curator told me he has heard people compare the building to a sneaker. I\u2019ve heard Angelenos talk about a mountain suddenly rising in South L.A., and, of course, an Imperial Star Destroyer. It\u2019s as svelte as an F1 car.It is now the second museum to arrive this year and shake up the city\u2019s architectural geography. Like the new Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Lucas also has civic ambitions. Tickets are $25, but anyone under 18 and or living in the museum\u2019s ZIP code, many of them low-income Angelenos, can enter free.Footpaths and garden crossings, where that gated surface parking lot had been, aim to knit the area\u2019s streets and sidewalks.We\u2019ll see how well those green spaces will be maintained, how open those neighborhood connections remain.But it\u2019s a safe bet that millions of children raised on their phones \u2014 who couldn\u2019t care less about the definition of narrative art \u2014 will embrace the museum.AdvertisementSKIP ADVERTISEMENTThey\u2019ll whoosh up and down the tubular glass elevators, run under the hanging gardens and across lawns devised by Mia Lehrer\u2019s landscape team at Studio-MLA.And be wowed by Ma\u2019s architecture.Who knows, some of them may even be inspired to put down those phones and pick up a pencil to draw.VideoCreditCredit...By Adam AmengualAdvertisementSKIP ADVERTISEMENT",
    "published_at": "2026-09-17T09:03:37+00:00",
    "author_name": "Michael Kimmelman",
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    "ai_headline": "Weird and Wonderful, the Lucas Museum Lands in L.A.",
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