The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art by George Lucas is coming to Los Angeles

Aerial view of Lucas Museum construction, July 2025, © 2025 JAKS Productions. Photo by Sand Hill Media/Eric Furie. All rights reserved.

The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art will officially open to the public on September 22, 2026, in Los Angeles's Exposition Park. Co-founded by George Lucas and Mellody Hobson, the museum was built on a clear conviction: that illustrated stories connect people and reflect the shared values that make communities. The opening date was officially announced on November 12, 2025.

The building is designed by MAD architects — the global practice founded by Ma Yansong, with offices in Beijing, Los Angeles, and Rome. The landscape design is by Mia Lehrer of Studio-MLA (Los Angeles), while Stantec — with Senior Principal Michael Siegel — served as executive architect, leading a team of over 150 architects, engineers, and designers through design development and construction.

A form that floats above the park
The campus spans 11 acres and features a building of approximately 300,000 square feet, rising five stories to a height of about 108 feet. The site was previously an asphalt parking lot — a radical transformation of urban waste into a new cultural and green hub for South Los Angeles.

The Lucas Museum Campus. Photography by Patrick Price

MAD's architectural language is unambiguously sculptural. The studio conceived a biomorphic structure with fluid, continuous surfaces that evoke a natural organism resting within the park. The building is lifted off the ground by central arched steel beams spanning 185 feet, creating a covered public plaza — a floating canopy — that physically separates the built mass from street level. The result is an accessible urban threshold, sheltered from the elements, designed to encourage spontaneous gathering.

At the center of the plaza, a central elliptical Oculus opens four stories upward toward the sky, establishing a vertical visual connection between interior and exterior. Three cylindrical glass elevators, visible from the north lobby, carry visitors up to the fourth-floor galleries, making the spatial journey fully perceptible.
Lucas Museum plaza construction, February 2025, © 2025 JAKS Productions. Photo courtesy of USC School of Cinematic Arts. Photo by Roberto Gomez. All rights reserved

Galleries, theaters, library: a rich and layered program
The building houses approximately 100,000 square feet of gallery space across three floors, organized into 35 galleries. The main exhibition hall on the fourth floor spans over 82,000 square feet in a continuous loop, choreographed to guide visitors effortlessly through the displays.

The program also includes:
- Two state-of-the-art cinematic theaters, each seating 299
- A horseshoe-shaped library with floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the park
- 10 studio and classroom spaces
- A café and a restaurant on the fifth floor with an outdoor terrace and sweeping views over Los Angeles
- Event spaces, a retail store, and community areas.

The galleries are named after themes drawn from the human experience — love, family, community, childhood, adventure — reflecting the museum's inclusive, narrative-driven identity.

The facade: 1,500 unique polymer panels
The exterior envelope is one of the project's most technically ambitious elements. The facade is clad in over 1,500 panels of fiberglass-reinforced polymer (FRP), each uniquely shaped, averaging approximately 8 by 32 feet. Every panel was fabricated through a process combining cutting-edge digital technology and robotics with handcrafting, ensuring chromatic consistency and surface quality across the entire curved volume. The joint lines between panels vary in width and orientation, strategically designed to complement the building's organic geometry without interrupting it.

A ribbon of glass fiber reinforced concrete (GFRC) flows along the edges of the park, completing the exterior composition.
Lucas Museum construction, February 2025, © 2025 JAKS Productions. Photo courtesy of USC School of Cinematic Arts. Photo by Roberto Gomez. All rights reserved

Sustainability and seismic engineering

The project incorporates an extensive set of environmental systems. The waterfall-like fountain on the northwest corner is more than a landscape feature: it functions as a renewable cooling source, connected to a geothermal system with 765 wells drilled to 350 feet deep, totaling over 113 miles of piping. On the roof, 24,000 square feet of monocrystalline solar photovoltaic cells — covering 15% of the roof surface — generate additional energy for the building.

A rainwater harvesting system, a super-insulated rain screen facade, displacement air conditioning, and full LED lighting complete a highly advanced sustainability profile.

On the seismic front, the museum employs a base isolation system typically reserved for hospitals and critical infrastructure: 281 seismic isolators — each consisting of a six-foot diameter concaved steel bowl with a large steel ball — allow the building to move up to 42 inches in any direction during a seismic event and recenter itself once the event is over. An eight-foot moveable perimeter "moat" surrounds the ground floor to accommodate ground movement.

The park and the urban dimension
The landscape design by Studio-MLA reimagines the campus with over 200 trees, native and drought-tolerant plantings, an amphitheater, a hanging garden, a meadow, and a dramatic waterfall fountain. The green roof extends across nearly one and a half acres.

The park establishes a pedestrian east-west connection that was previously absent, linking Vermont Avenue to the rest of Exposition Park — an urban gesture that extends well beyond the museum's boundaries, reshaping the accessibility and permeability of this part of South Los Angeles, within five miles of over 500 schools.

The collection
The permanent collection holds over 40,000 works, ranging from classic illustration — Norman Rockwell, Maxfield Parrish, Jessie Willcox Smith — to comics — Jack Kirby, R. Crumb, Winsor McCay, Alison Bechdel — from mural painting — Judith F. Baca, Diego Rivera — to photography — Gordon Parks, Dorothea Lange, Henri Cartier-Bresson. The museum also houses the Lucas Archives, featuring models, concept art, costumes, and props from George Lucas's filmmaking career.