On the second to last day of the first month of 2023, former Los Angeles mayor Eric Garcetti, who had finished his final term but was still waiting to be confirmed by the US Senate as ambassador to India, returned to city hall. He was there to unveil his official mayoral portrait by Shepard Fairey, which depicted a somber Garcetti in the same graphic style as the famous Barack Obama poster. Unlike HOPE, its touchstones were hidden, like one of those Magic Eye posters that slowly come into focus: the beleaguered Sixth Street Bridge (opened in 2022), the automated people mover to LAX (estimated completion: 2024), the logo of the city’s Olympic Games (2028), and, tucked over Garcetti’s shoulder, an aerial rendering of the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, scheduled to open in Exposition Park in 2025.
I recognized the unmistakable curves of a Dr. Scholl’s insole hovering above the rooftops of South Los Angeles right away. I had flashbacks to the “Quit yellin’, we’re gellin’” memes from when the project was first revealed in 2017. But its presence in the portrait was befuddling. Garcetti was mayor for nearly ten years, in office during some of the most dramatic changes to the city’s skyline in decades. Instead of, say, the Wilshire Grand or one of the permanent supportive housing projects funded by Measure HHH or even the brand-new Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, Garcetti chose to forever associate his mayoralty with a building that few outside Architecture Twitter (RIP) would recognize on sight—a building rejected by two other cities, funded by a very wealthy person with a tenuous-at-best connection to LA and still years from completion. Why?
Standing beneath the northern edge of the 300,000-square-foot building, as I did on a recent construction tour, I was slightly disappointed to see that the real-life museum for which George Lucas paid $1 billion does not evoke the inside of a running shoe. The windows have been installed, and the steel exoskeleton was being fitted with fiberglass-reinforced panels, which, from some angles at least, gave the thing the look of a grinning great white shark. A massive mist-billowing waterfall, currently being installed at the base of the building, will really bring this home, I decide. But Sandra Jackson-Dumont, the museum’s director and CEO, wants to show me something else: A fence, which previously walled off the adjacent community from the park, has been torn down, finally granting easy access to the residents of South LA—and beyond. “What everyone’s doing here is looking out towards the neighborhoods,” she says. “This becomes a central hub, with all these nodes throughout LA, so people just find their way here.” She waves north at Metro’s E (formerly Expo) light-rail line, which stops at the park twice. “It’s amazing, right?” she says. “It cuts across the entire city.”
Headlines claim the project is four years late, but even factoring in the pandemic-era supply chain delays, the timeline will not be markedly different than that of the Academy Museum, which opened in 2021 and took about six years to materialize. It just feels longer for an institution that’s been nearly a decade in the making. At first, Lucas wanted it situated in his hometown, adjacent to the Lucasfilm campus in San Francisco’s Crissy Field, but he was chased away by preservationists in the Presidio. He took the museum to Chicago, the hometown of his wife, Mellody Hobson, but it was rejected by advocates of retaining open public space along Lake Michigan. What happened next was completely unprecedented in the museum-design world, but perhaps not if you are a self-described “architectural hobbyist” with Star Wars toy residual money: Lucas asked Ma Yansong of MAD Architects, who had already drawn up the two defeated renderings, to draw two more renderings, one for LA’s Exposition Park and one for San Francisco’s Treasure Island, and let the two mayors battle it out on social media as if their baseball teams were facing off in the National League playoffs. (I may have posted a tweet or two.) The spectacle seemed designed to overshadow what was a fairly lukewarm response to the museum itself; by then the nation’s architecture critics had suffered such severe rendering fatigue that it seemed pointless to note the lack of local context in the LA design, an anonymous dirigible that could just as easily be tethered to a more welcoming city. The art world was less forgiving; Los Angeles Times art critic Christopher Knight called the proposal a “bad idea” and suggested Lucas’s collection would better serve the city by being divvied up among existing local museums. This all happened during a period when LA’s boosters were embarrassingly thirsty for mediocre wins: During the years the Lucas Museum was in play, Garcetti’s office was shamelessly pitching the city to the International Olympic Committee, which ended up simultaneously awarding the 2024 and 2028 summer games to Paris and LA, respectively, because we were literally the only candidates. Los Angeles: Don’t want it? We’ll take it!
Standing beneath the northern edge of the 300,000 square-foot building, I was slightly disappointed to see that the real-life museum for which George Lucas paid $1 billion does not evoke the inside of a running shoe. The windows have been installed, and the steel exoskeleton was being fitted with fiberglass-reinforced panels, which, from some angles at least, gave the thing the look of a grinning great white shark.
The bid book the mayor’s office produced to woo the Lucas Museum insists that one of the advantages to LA’s site was an already-approved environmental impact review, requiring no input from the surrounding communities. (An emblematic promise from the pitch reads, “We will cut the red tape and bureaucracy to bring this museum to life!”) But this was slightly misleading because there was no real red tape for the city to cut; the museum’s site, previously a parking lot often used by fans tailgating before USC football games, is leased not from the city but from the state of California, which manages most of the 160-acre park. By the time the Lucas deal was inked in 2017, there were already eight cultural institutions here, including the Coliseum, plus a soccer stadium under construction (formerly Banc of California Stadium, now BMO Stadium). And while a museum is ostensibly better than a parking lot, what neighbors might have said, if asked, is that the last thing Exposition Park needed was another museum. What it needed was more actual park. Luckily, the Lucas Museum has brought with it eleven acres of native plants, programmable landscapes, and grassy knolls, thoughtfully designed by Mia Lehrer’s Studio-MLA, that introduce some topography to a very flat Exposition Park. The roof, with its panoramic views of the city, is another green space, already planted with dozens of trees and hanging gardens that will spill through a hole at the center—called the Oculus—cascading down to a plaza below. At the very least, the Lucas Museum delivers a very nice park that happens to have a museum hovering above it.
Due to the name on the door, the swoopy walls and pneumatic tube–like elevators will draw inevitable comparisons to intergalactic space travel. The amenities are also well-designed and predictably high-tech: 100,000 square feet of very attractive gallery space, programming in two theaters engineered to Lucas’s THX sound standards, multiple restaurants, and, I’d guess, one heck of a gift shop. But visitors expecting a Star Wars museum are likely to be disappointed—although there are plenty of those props and scenic artworks in Lucas’s collection—because the focus here, according to the museum’s promotional materials, is on how “visual storytelling can connect us and help shape a more just society.” Jackson-Dumont, who previously served as the public program director at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, is acutely aware that the original Darth Vader mask might be the initial draw. But her job is leveraging that name recognition into connections: between the 100,000 artworks collected by Lucas and Hobson (who are buying more all the time); between fine art and other mediums like graphic novels, children’s books, and magazine spreads; and between the building and the neighborhood. “You come to this place initially because you know who he is, and you see the aerial shot of the building, and you think, Oh, it looks like a spaceship,” she says. “But as you walk through the whole building, you have these conversations about nature and place and community and the city, and you walk out and you’re like, Oh, this is interesting. This is a bridge.”
By all accounts, Lucas likes to be involved in what his fortune builds. Just across the street at his alma mater USC, he made design decisions for a $175 million Mission Revival–style building he gifted to the School of Cinematic Arts. In San Francisco, he pushed for the adaptive reuse of a historic hospital complex to house his Lucasfilm campus and kept the majority of the grounds open to the public. At his neo-Victorian compound at Skywalker Ranch, an hour north in Marin, he’s tried for a decade to develop affordable housing on his land. (Will the Bay Area just let this man build something?) But Lucas and Hobson have also funneled a substantial portion of their wealth into education, and this location offers a tremendous opportunity, says Zahirah Mann, president and CEO of the South Los Angeles Transit Empowerment Zone (SLATE-Z), the Obama-designated Promise Zone that encompasses Exposition Park. After working with the Lucas Museum to hire local construction workers, SLATE-Z will help the museum forge a deep connection with local schools, 500 of which are located within a five-mile radius. What Lucas’s presence does here is “shine a light on South Los Angeles,” says Mann. “We hope that this light will bring more resources, understanding, and support for our South LA residents, students, and businesses.”
Wandering the park, I notice that the Lucas Museum is not the only site shrouded in scaffolding, a sign that more resources are, indeed, on the way. The adjacent Natural History Museum is expanding its footprint; the California African American Museum is making major upgrades; and a pair of 116-foot rocket motors has just been hauled into the California Science Center. “The park is outgrowing its original scope, and we have to think about what the next phase looks like to be able to accommodate the millions of additional visitors over the next few years,” Andrea Ambriz, the general manager of Exposition Park, tells me. The Lucas Museum will add some of those visitors, and so will more music festivals and special events. But Ambriz is also planning for more everyday visits: bike rides or family picnics or meals out at restaurants that stay open after museum hours. A new master plan still needs to be fully funded, but it was recently awarded some state money to transform another surface parking lot into green space. There are also more pedestrian crossings planned for the park. And we can’t forget the Olympics, which will begin right here at the Coliseum, forever intertwined with the Lucas Museum’s fate. The museum will have a front-row seat in more ways than one: Hobson also sits on the LA28 organizing committee.
And that year, 2028, might be the first time that Garcetti’s motivation for making this building the anchor of his mayoral legacy comes into focus: turning LA’s most prime Olympics-adjacent real estate into something guaranteed to wow in NBC’s wide shots. But in the desperation to win Lucas over—“I believed in the vision for the Lucas Museum, and we went after it with everything we have,” Garcetti said in 2017—the people who ran the city picked the path of least resistance, wedging it in awkwardly here, as low-effort set-dressing for their boosterism. When LA properly leverages a billionaire’s money, we get the Eli Broad Grand Avenue package: two apartment towers plus a park and also a museum. Lucas’s museum should be capping a freeway, laying down dozens of acres of park space, and delivering all the affordable housing that Marin would never allow. But I can also see the future that Jackson-Dumont envisions: an institution that truly spills out into the neighborhood, South LA as the center of the city, the Expo Line (it will always be the Expo Line) swishing past to points east and west. When another art museum across town is spending $1 billion on a clunky Caltrans overpass to nowhere, I’ll take the great white shark in a park any day. But it remains to be seen if the Lucas Museum can build an actual bridge for a city desperate to be connected.