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May the Second be with you … or something like that. Only two days out from the pun-based May 4th holiday beloved by Star Wars devotees, it’s time for a look in on the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, where construction is not taking a millennium but may feel like it for some people. Delays, sophisticated architecture and the pandemic have pushed its completion date from 2021 to 2025. But the billion-dollar, 300,000-sq.-ft. project — devoted to much more than “Star Wars” and funded entirely by George Lucas — is moving toward launch on an 11-acre campus at Exposition Park in Los Angeles, where Lucas decided to locate it after being rebuffed by Chicago. The building, clad in more than 1,500 curved fiberglass-reinforced polymer (FRP) panels, is designed by Ma Yansong of MAD Architects and Michael Siegel of Stantec is executive architect. Co-founded by George Lucas and Mellody Hobson, the museum is led by director and CEO Sandra Jackson-Dumont.
In an update from fall 2022, the museum stated that “through robust community outreach efforts in partnership with Slate Z, L.A. Trade-Tech, the City of L.A., local unions, and other workforce development nonprofits, the building project to date has employed more than 4,200 workers, more than 60% of whom live in Los Angeles County.” More than 350 permanent jobs are expected to be created when it opens. A report last year by Adam Nagourney of The New York Times noted that “even in the haze of construction, a seemingly endless swirl of workers, cranes and girders, 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 the nation’s best-known filmmakers, and a massive repository for an eclectic collection of 100,000 paintings, photographs, book illustrations and comic book drawings.”
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