The Force is with Los Angeles, apparently. After years of push and pull among the cities of Chicago, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, new architectural plans have emerged for an LA venue for filmmaker George Lucas’s long-contested project, the Lucas Museum of Narrative Arts.
Documents have been filed with the city of Los Angeles for a design by MAD architects, a company with firms in New York, Los Angeles, and Beijing, as was reported by Urbanize LA and the Architects Newspaper.
In June 2014, the cost for the project was estimated at about $700 million. It’s now set to be a $1 billion project, and construction is set to commence in 2018.
MAD Architects’s plans for George Lucas’s Museum of Decorative Arts, in Los Angeles.
Los Angeles’s Exposition Park, just to the south of the main campus of the University of Southern California and the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, would be the site for the museum, which would be set on an 11-acre park.
The plans reveal a museum in the shape of two elongated, streamlined-looking pods. The site would offer all the amenities that go along with museum galleries, namely entertainment spaces, food service, and education spaces. Distinct from the plans for other cities, the Los Angeles plans involve some 2,425 parking spaces, far more than for other plans, according to the Architects Newspaper.