Ambitious Lucas Museum Is Slowly Rising

LOS ANGELES — It was chased out of Chicago by preservationists, only to become the object of a bidding war between Los Angeles and San Francisco. When George Lucas finally decided to build his $1 billion museum in Los Angeles, it was jeered by some critics who saw it as a vanity project.

Since then, the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art has been beset by more delays: It is not expected to open until 2025, seven years after ground was first broken on a parking lot across the street from the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum with a promised 2021 opening.

But the enormous scope of the project is coming into focus as its futuristic new home rises in Exposition Park: a grand homage to one of America’s best-known filmmakers, and a repository for 100,000 paintings, photographs, book illustrations and comic book drawings.

Its huge expanse of curving gray metal hovers over the landscape like a low-flying spaceship, a fitting tribute to its namesake and patron, who created the Star Wars franchise. It stands five stories high, and it takes 15 minutes to walk across its sprawling campus.

“We are committed to creating an incredibly complicated building,” said Sandra Jackson-Dumont, the museum’s director. “There isn’t a straight line in the whole place.”

The delays are a result of a pandemic that has slowed projects across America.

But the slow pace is also evidence of the dramatic construction and design ambitions of Mr. Lucas and his wife, Mellody Hobson, the co-chief executive officer of Ariel Investments. That includes more than 1,500 individually fabricated curved panels of fiberglass-reinforced polymer that make up the building’s shell, three curved-glass elevators, an elliptical oculus, a rooftop garden with full-grown trees, and two 299-seat theaters, all resting on 281 seismic base isolators to protect the building — and its valuable collection of art — from an earthquake.

The Lucas was designed by Ma Yansong, one of China’s most prominent architects; its gardens and parks were conceived by Mia Lehrer, the landscape architect.

Despite the name, it will not be a museum devoted to Mr. Lucas’s film career. While the Lucas Museum will display some parts of the Lucasfilm archive, it is devoted to art that tells stories, an imprecise label that includes works by artists ranging from Norman Rockwell to Robert Crumb, along with pieces by Frida Kahlo, Maxfield Parrish, Jacob Lawrence, Judy Baca and others.

The 28,000-square-meter Lucas Museum stands out even in a wave of cultural construction in Los Angeles: the $650 million David Geffen Galleries at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, set to open next year; the 24-year reconstruction of the Hammer Museum; and the Academy Museum, which opened in 2021.

“It’s a very significant addition to the cultural scene of not just California but to the West Coast,” said Michael Govan, the head of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. “You can start to feel the impact that such a huge gift is going to have.”

People could be forgiven for wondering if the museum will ever be finished. But now, the more intriguing question is whether the project can draw the crowds to fill its vast halls.

Rahm Emanuel, who, when he was mayor of Chicago, fought unsuccessfully to convince his city to approve the Lucas Museum, said he had always been certain the museum would have been a huge boon.

“I can’t speak to the gain for L.A. but I can speak to the loss for Chicago,” he said. “It was competitive and we wanted it. The museum would have been an incredible contribution.”

Ms. Jackson-Dumont came to Los Angeles after serving as the head of education of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. She said she knew the project would be daunting, but that the pandemic made it even more challenging.

“I am not frustrated,” she said. “To open a building that is going to be a 200-year proposition, I think we should take a second to make sure we are getting things right, and getting it right when the entire world seems to be coming to pieces.”