Lucas Museum of Narrative Art | MAD architects

Description The home of the new Lucas Museum of Narrative Art is an 11-acre campus with a landscape consisting of trees, gardens, walkways, and architectural features that embrace an approximately 300,000-square- foot building—all currently under construction on a site that was formerly an asphalt parking lot in Los Angeles’s Exposition Park. The five-story museum building includes approximately 100,000 square feet of dedicated gallery space, two state-of-the-art cinematic theaters, numerous spaces for education, a café and a restaurant, and retail and special events spaces. The rolling landscape of the new park creates much needed green space for South Los Angeles while providing the Lucas Museum with a variety of outdoor areas for programming and incorporates beautiful architectural features throughout including a hanging garden, an amphitheater, a pedestrian bridge, and a waterfall- like fountain.

With a stunning architectural vision for the building created by Ma Yansong/MAD, a dynamic design for the park and gardens created by Mia Lehrer of Los Angeles’s Studio-MLA, and Michael Siegel of Stantec as executive architect leading a talented team through the process of realizing the vision and construction, the Lucas Museum’s campus will be an innovative new cultural landmark for Los Angeles.

MAD - Inspiration and Design Concept:

MAD’s design for the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art serves as a metaphor for storytelling and imagination, offering a space to explore new possibilities. The design was conceptualized to reflect Los Angeles’s vibrant pioneering spirit and embrace of its diverse inhabitants, representing a celebration of dialogue, understanding, and inclusivity. It stands as a testament to the city's vibrancy, history of innovation, and rich cultural tapestry. For an institution dedicated to the art of visual storytelling, the design of the campus invites the visitor on a journey long before stepping into the museum’s galleries. The expansive, ever- changing green space—including the park and the trees and plantings across the roof of the building—will continue to evolve alongside its surroundings, symbolizing new chapters and a forward-looking perspective in the narrative of the city. The museum's reflective approach encourages a fluid transition between indoor and outdoor realms, reflecting humans' innate tendency to seek connections with nature. The museum’s biomorphic, dream-like form features fluid and soft shapes creating a distinctive and recognizable landmark and offering an immersive experience that explores the relationship between nature, society, and the urban environment.

The Building

The Lucas Museum’s state of the art building will add to the rich legacy of architectural innovation in Los Angeles. Ma Yansong’s architectural vision creates a building which is an organic sculptural form in a park that pushes the boundaries of architecture and creates a sense of wonder. The building is lifted off the ground to create human scale at street level, fostering natural social interaction, preserving views, and enhancing the overall experience of the site. Central arched steel beams spanning 185 feet form a lifted public plaza—a canopy that floats above people below and offers shade, protection against environmental elements, and a space of gathering. With the lifted building, the ground level is integrated with the landscape and surrounding streetscape, allowing it to function as part of the environment, and keeping more open, ground-level space for people. The plaza creates a gateway to Exposition Park from the west and offers access to the museum’s north and south lobbies whose grandeur, tall ceilings, and abundant natural light create inviting and spacious atmospheres. A central elliptical Oculus hovers four stories above the plaza, opening a view from ground to sky.

Principal public areas on the lower floors, aside from the lobbies, include two state-of-the-art theaters, each seating 299; a horseshoe-shaped library and learning space with floor-to-ceiling windows that look out onto the surrounding park; 10 studio and classroom spaces; a shop; a café; and an approximately 10,000-square-foot gallery. Of the five public elevators on the building’s north side, three cylindrical glass elevators in glass shafts provide transparency and visibility as they dramatically carry visitors from the north lobby to the vast galleries on the fourth floor, allowing visitors to see and understand their journey as they transition into the world of narrative art. Visitors’ movement through the fourth-floor galleries, which span some 82,000 square feet, is choreographed by a path that effortlessly loops through exhibition spaces. The fifth floor offers nearly 8,000 square feet of additional gallery space with a sculpted ceiling, a large event space, as well as a restaurant with indoor seating and an outdoor terrace that offers sweeping views of Los Angeles.

The biomorphic form of the building is designed to cantilever far beyond the support of where the building touches the ground to give the impression that the building is floating over the park. To realize the design of the exterior, the building is clad in more than 1,500 panels of fiberglass-reinforced polymer (FRP), which was selected due to the material’s ability to create smooth, flowing forms and its minimal weight compared to other materials. The curved panels measure approximately 8 by 32 feet on average and each of the 1,500 panels are uniquely shaped and placed to create the whole. They are fabricated using a process which combines cutting-edge digital technology and robotics with handcrafting to fabricate and finish each unique panel to ensure smoothness and color consistency. The joint lines between the panels vary in width and orientation and were strategically designed to complement the building’s organic geometry. An architectural ribbon of durable glass fiber reinforced concrete (GFRC) flows around edges of the park.

The technologies needed to shape and fit the FRP panels, along with other advanced construction methods including a cloud-based modeling and collaboration system used by a team of more than 150 architects, engineers, and designers, only began to emerge a decade ago, making the Lucas Museum truly a building made for our time.

The Park

Designed by Mia Lehrer of Studio-MLA, the Lucas Museum Park and Gardens are dynamic environments that will change visually with the seasons, offering a different experience during each visit to the Lucas Museum. This diverse and enriching park landscape includes hundreds of indigenous and drought-tolerant plantings and replaces what was previously asphalt parking lots. More than 200 trees are being planted, and landforms are being created to evoke the terrain of Los Angeles as a plain nestled between mountains. A variety of spaces, from a hanging garden to an amphitheater, a meadow, and a fountain conceived as a broad, dramatic waterfall, will provide programmable areas, communal gathering spaces, and places for quiet reflection and enjoyment. With access from both the east and west sides of the campus, the museum’s park creates a pedestrian connection between Vermont Avenue to the west and the rest of Exposition Park to the east, which was previously lacking. The campus’s green space continues on the top level of the building with almost an acre and a half of landscaped roof.

Sustainability

In addition to creating new park and garden space for an area of the city where more green space is needed, the museum has integrated sustainable elements throughout the campus. The Lucas Museum wears many of its sustainable elements on the outside, showcasing its commitment to both aesthetic and functional sustainability. A grand waterfall-like fountain on the northwest corner of the campus provides not just a pleasing public amenity but also renewable cooling for the building, while using less energy and water than a standard cooling tower. The cooling created from the falling water connected with the cooling from the building’s expansive geothermal system that has 765 wells, each drilled to 350 feet deep, totaling 113 miles of piping, creates an invisible renewable cooling source. Whereas water runoff from the previous asphalt parking lot went into the city sewer system, the museum’s new landscaping uses a rain- harvesting system to capture water for irrigation. Additionally, integrated into the sloped roof’s design are 24,000 square feet of monocrystalline solar photovoltaic cells (a type of solar panel), which cover 15% of the roof’s surface, will be visible to the public, and will provide additional energy to the building. While there are many additional sustainable features through the museum’s sustainability program, other highlights include the rain screen façade which incorporates a super insulated enclosure, displacement air throughout the building for optimal space conditioning, and LED lighting throughout. Coupled with the more typical environmental sustainability initiatives, these unique sustainability aspects represent a significant contribution to our community and future. In addition, the Lucas Museum is accessible by many modes of public transportation, with close proximity to two major Metro stations and multiple bus stops, as well as providing ample parking for bicycles and electric vehicles.

Seismic Elements

The building is utilizing an incredible seismic isolation system more commonly found in structures like hospitals. The enormous building rests on a base isolation system that allows the ground to move 42 inches in any direction during a seismic event and recenter itself when the event over. The building sits on 281 seismic base isolators, each consisting of a six-foot diameter concaved steel bowl with a large steel ball, which rest on top of the foundation. The perimeter of the ground floor is surrounded by a eight-foot “moat,” or moveable sidewalk, which allows the seismic motion of the ground surrounding the building. This cutting-edge earthquake technology protects visitors, staff, and art during a seismic event.

Underground Parking

The Lucas Museum is built on a site that was formerly asphalt parking lots in Exposition Park. The museum built two underground public parking garages, owned by the State of California, with more than 2,300 spaces total—about 600 more spaces than the previous asphalt lots.

Exposition Park

The location of the Lucas Museum within Los Angeles’s Exposition Park provides remarkable opportunities to collaborate and partner with other Los Angeles cultural institutions. Located southwest of Downtown Los Angeles, the 160-acre Exposition Park is home to cultural, educational, and recreational institutions including the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, the California African American Museum, the California Science Center and Theodore J. Alexander Science Center School, Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, Los Angeles Sports Arena, the Exposition Park Rose Garden, and EXPO Center. With more than a half a million people living within a three-mile radius of the park, Exposition Park is an important resource for its immediate communities, in addition to being a destination that is enjoyed by visitors from across the state, the nation, and the world. It is one of the top five tourist and visitor destinations in Southern California, attracting some four million visitors a year. The Lucas Museum is located at the northwest corner of Exposition Park, on a site that was formerly asphalt parking lots.

Construction Hiring

The Lucas Museum has worked closely with its contractor, Hathaway Dinwiddie, and the City of Los Angeles to set and meet ambitious goals for local hiring and for increasing the pipeline for subcontracting with businesses owned by women, minorities, and veterans at various levels of construction and professional services. To date, the building project has employed more than 5,000 workers, more than 65% of whom live in Los Angeles County. The museum and Hathaway Dinwiddie have initiated robust community outreach efforts to expand the pool of local and diverse candidates and businesses. The project has participated in and hosted numerous community events attended by local businesses and more than 1,000 job seekers, many of whom were new to construction or not yet members of a union, and has partnered on recruitment efforts with Slate Z, L.A. Trade-Tech, the City of L.A., local unions, and other workforce development nonprofits.

Location / History

In 2014, George Lucas and Mellody Hobson initiated an international competition for the design of a new museum of narrative art, which was to be located in Chicago. MAD’s winning design was chosen for its innovative approach and the firm’s ability to connect a building’s architecture with its surrounding nature and society. However, in 2015 due to disagreement over the use of the Chicago site, it was decided that the museum would move to a location in California. Los Angeles and San Francisco were evaluated to see which city best aligned with the museum’s mission and vision. MAD created unique designs for locations in both San Francisco’s Treasure Island and Los Angeles’s Exposition Park. The Los Angeles site was selected for its location within large, diverse surrounding communities and proximity to more than 500 schools in a five-mile radius. In 2016, Los Angeles was selected as the future home of the museum.

Construction Fun Facts

Excavating the underground garages created enough dirt to fill 115 Olympic-sized swimming pools. The building will include 118,000 cubic yards of concrete—enough to cover a football field and reach up to 57’ high. With the 118,000 cubic yards of concrete used to create the Lucas Museum’s campus, you could create a sidewalk from Los Angeles to Chicago. More than 11,200 concrete trucks were needed to deliver the concrete used in the building. In the foundation alone, there are 5,598 tons of rebar—enough steel to build 4,665 cars. The 1,500 fiberglass-reinforced polymer (FRP) panels for the façade of the building contain enough FRP to cover 2,650 corvettes. The building’s main 82,000-square-foot gallery space on the fourth floor is as big as one-and-a-half football fields. The building’s roof (720 feet long x 270 feet wide x 108 feet high) is comparable to that of a mid-sized aircraft carrier.

Design and Construction Team

The architectural vision for the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art is achieved through strong collaboration between talented and innovative architecture, construction, and engineering teams.

Design Architect
MAD
Ma Yansong, Dang Qun, Yosuke Hayano – Principal partners in charge

Architect of Record
Stantec
Michael Siegel, Senior Principal
Gayle Soberg, Senior Technical Designer

Landscape Design Architect
Studio-MLA
Mia Lehrer, Founder and President

Construction Manager
Diversified Project Development
Cory Langer, Principal

JLL
Dustin Worland, Vice President
Lynne Delameter, Vice President

General Contractor
Hathaway Dinwiddie
Rick Cridland, Vice President/Project Executive

Structural Engineer
LERA

Mechanical, Electrical, Plumbing, Fire Life Safety 
Alfa Tech

General Countractor (Exhibits) 
Rudolf & Sletten