Inside MAD’s Lucas Museum of Narrative Art

L.A. museums are in their soft, right-angle-rejecting era. Architect Ma Yansong of Beijing-based MAD’s curvaceous, floating, spaceship-like structure follows Peter Zumthor’s David Geffen Galleries at LACMA and Renzo Piano’s so-called “bubble” at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures. On what was formerly a surface parking lot owned by the state of California and leased to the museum now stands 100,000-square-feet of gallery space that houses the founders’ personal and deeply idiosyncratic collection. 

Instead of USC tailgate parties and baking asphalt, Ma’s vision, inspired by tree canopies and cloud formations, coexists with Studio-MLA’s landscape plan. Rolling lawns, extensive native plantings, ten bronze sculptures (in another vignette that smashes cultural hierarchies, Princess Leia Frees Herself from Jabba the Hutt by Mark Newman and Giovanni Nakpil stands with Fernando Botero’s Maternity in view), meandering paths through gentle slopes, and an amphitheater make this a welcome community space in a notoriously park-poor city. 

The building expresses Lucas Museum’s populist ethos and its subject matter, which senior curator Ryan Linkof described as “the art and the visual culture that we consume every day, often without even realizing it.” MAD with executive architects Stantec have constructed a crowd-pleasing, experiential spectacle of biomorphic, organic forms clad in approximately 1,500 glass fiber-reinforced plastic panels fabricated by Kreysler & Associates in Northern California. After passing through the compact, capsule-like entrance into the central plaza that’s covered beneath a 185-foot span, the main north lobby swoops and soars like a science fiction set.The building’s undulating roofline, topped with a combination of living green roof and solar panels, makes for an instantly recognizable addition to the cityscape south of downtown L.A. 

“Architecture should be narrative art already. It is life, and life is narrative art,” Ma explains during a later conversation. “Most architecture now has a problem. It’s become a very abstract product. It doesn’t [have to] do with life, with the time. When architecture is humanized, people will have an emotional connection,” he says. At the Lucas Museum, nostalgia is a big emotional driver. The Naboo N-1 Starfighter suspended from the south entrance to the education wing, where the wood-clad, multi-tiered research library Ma noted is “a little more classic”—despite the museum having effectively eliminated its education department—teases what promises to be the main draw for many visitors: the Star Wars in Motion exhibition that comprises iconic memorabilia from the Lucas Archives.  

Inside what Lucas has described as a home “dedicated to the people’s art” around the corner from the two 299-seat theaters, the ground level houses The History of Narrative Art: Heroes • Myths • The Sacred. It’s a mostly baffling installation that reads like a non-linear Art History 101 course supercharged with technology, where sacred cows of museum-worthy authenticity are slaughtered. State-of-the-art digital projections of foundational works of storytelling and myth-making (Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling, Hagia Sophia), mixed with reproductions of three-dimensional objects (the Aztec sun stone from the Museo Nacional de Antropología in Mexico City, Assyrian Lamassu figures), intermingled with jewels in the Lucas collection crown (The Triumph of Galatea attributed to Artemisia Gentileschi’s workshop and John Singer Sargent’s 1879 copy of Diego Velázquez’s Las Meninas).  

A trio of transparent elevator chutes makes for a futuristic, cinematic journey from the lobby to the fourth floor, where overwhelmingly scaled corridors connect the conventional interior galleries with over 1,300 works on display. Spaces focused on single artists, including Norman Rockwell, Thomas Hart Benton, and Maxfield Parrish, are interspersed with thematically organized spaces such as Love, History, Sports, Children’s Stories, Comics, and Science Fiction. Certain juxtapositions are provocative; spotting Frida Kahlo’s Self-Portrait Dedicated to Dr. Eloesser mere feet away from a scene painted by Cassius Marcellus Coolidge that in 1894 helped introduce the oft-revisited visual joke of dogs playing poker will prompt double takes, laughs, and befuddled expressions. It’s more evidence of Lucas’ contrarian sensibility that can read as at odds with the architecture. 

The inaugural architecture presentation showcases completed MAD projects and unrealized proposals for San Francisco and Chicago sites before the Lucas Museum found its home across from the filmmaker’s alma mater, University of Southern California. Fifth-floor galleries are dedicated to murals and street art, ranging from Judy Baca’s The Great Wall of Los Angeles documentation to Banksy. The Skywalker Grill rooftop restaurant, designed by the Rockwell Group, occupies the fifth-floor volume north of the oculus.