Design for Lucas Museum of Narrative Art has protectionists worried
Futuristic design of Lucas Museum in Chicago has advocacy group worried about encroachment on Lake Michigan shoreline, writes Blair Kamin
If you expect American filmmaker George Lucas to give Chicago a low-slung museum that'll slip quietly into the fiercely contested ground of the city's lakefront, I have news for you: you're wrong.
A conceptual plan recently revealed for the proposed Lucas Museum of Narrative Art sketches a far more ambitious vision from the Star Wars creator and his architect: a curvaceous, nearly windowless mountain of a building, topped by a glassy observation deck that would resemble a flying saucer.
But open-space advocacy group Friends of the Parks sued the city on Thursday, saying the site is on a lakefront spot that cannot be handed over to a private entity. It says the design is a view-obstructing intrusion on the Lake Michigan shoreline. "It's like this amorphous, land-eating colossus," its president Cassandra Francis says.
But the museum's 39-year-old architect, Ma Yansong of Beijing, says his design will have an impact comparable to that of the city's Millennium Park, a public area once occupied by parking lots and rail yards but now a tourist attraction that has ignited a development boom around it. "Our site deserves something like that," Ma says. "I'm sure that people will find this better than the existing parking lot."
Yet there's plenty of artistic licence in Ma's concept of a mountain rising gracefully from the lakefront landscape. Chicago, after all, is pancake flat and, lacking real mountains, the city has built soaring peaks of steel, glass and stone. Ma's structure is about 34 metres tall.
Whatever one thinks of Ma's design, it represents a radical turnaround from the traditional Spanish revival design Lucas floated last year for a site in San Francisco which was turned down by the city's planners in February.