If you expected filmmaker George Lucas to give Chicago a low-slung museum that would slip quietly into the fiercely contested ground of the city's lakefront, I have news for you: You expected wrong.
A conceptual plan for the proposed Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, revealed Monday, sketches a far more ambitious vision from the "Star Wars" creator: A curvaceous, nearly windowless mountain of a building, topped by a glassy observation deck that would resemble a flying saucer.
The open space advocacy group, Friends of the Parks, which has threatened to block the project in court, can be counted on to attack the design as a view-blocking intrusion on the shoreline.
But in an interview, the museum's 39-year-old architect, Ma Yansong of Beijing, predicted that his design would have an impact comparable to Millennium Park's transformation of a surface parking lot and exposed rail yards into an iconic tourist attraction that has ignited a development boom around it.
"Our site deserves something like that," he said. "I'm sure that people will find this better than the existing parking lot."
Yet there's plenty of artistic license in Ma's concept of a mountain rising gracefully from the lakefront landscape. Chicago, after all, is pancake flat. Lacking real mountains, the city built soaring peaks of steel, glass and stone. All of them, with the exception of the three-lobed Lake Point Tower, are west of Lake Shore Drive.
Ma's mountain would be about 110 feet tall, the architect estimated, roughly 40 feet shorter than nearby Soldier Field. He said the building would match the horizontal proportions of Soldier Field to the north and, to the south, the McCormick Place Lakeside Center, a black box that lakefront preservationists unsuccessfully fought to keep off the shoreline.
Whatever one thinks of Ma's design, it represents a radical turnaround from the traditional, Spanish revival design Lucas floated last year for a choice site in San Francisco - only to have planners there turn the project down last February.
The seven-level, 400,000-square-foot structure would occupy the southern half of a 17-acre site offered to Lucas by Mayor Rahm Emanuel, who wrested the project from San Francisco. Emanuel has portrayed the Lucas Museum as the ideal way to complete Chicago's Museum Campus, a cluster of three natural history museums: the Field Museum, the Shedd Aquarium and the Adler Planetarium.
"We want this building to be part of the Museum Campus," Ma reiterated Monday. "We want to create a destination, to really attract a lot of young people to come and explore."
The building would be clad in a whitish-gray type of stone or concrete, a departure from Ma's habit of covering his designs in silvery metal skins. That cladding could either enhance the Lucas Museum's relationship to the classically inspired temples of the Museum Campus or make it a leaden presence.
No price tag is attached to the project, which is expected to be formally submitted to city officials in the spring. Lucas has promised to pay for the building and landscaping, though the city could be hit with expenses for related items to ease anticipated traffic congestion.
"We welcome this initial conceptual design so that Chicagoans can begin to explore a new museum and park on our Museum Campus," mayoral spokesman Adam Collins said.
Ma made his presentation Monday in a conference room at the Waldorf Astoria Chicago. Joining him were Angelo Garcia, president of Lucas Real Estate Holdings and vice president of the museum, and Michael Toolis, chief of the Chicago architectural firm VOA Associates, which will be responsible for details like construction drawings.
VOA has designed offices for Ariel Investments, whose president, Mellody Hobson, is Lucas' wife.
The three men described key features of the proposal:
- Visitors could park in an existing two-level structure, known as the Waldron parking deck, on the north side of the museum site. A new pedestrian bridge, spanning the curving road that leads into the Museum Campus from Lake Shore Drive, would bring visitors to the museum's main entrance, facing Lake Michigan.
- That entrance, outdoor plazas and an amphitheater would be on the museum's second level. They would form a platform that would partially cover the existing surface lot, which is known as the South Lot. Extending into the landscape, these outdoor elements would be the equivalent of foothills to Ma's mountain.
"The whole idea of the building is to be part of nature, part of (the) landscape," the architect said.
- The southernmost portion of the South Lot would remain uncovered but would get additional landscaping. The Lucas team has begun negotiations with the Chicago Park District, Soldier Field's owner, to ensure that Bears fans are not denied tailgating spots outside the stadium, Toolis said.
- The design will include a significant addition of green space to the Museum Campus, but no estimate of how many acres was given.
- Once inside the museum, visitors would encounter a sky-lit, domed lobby, ringed by galleries for Lucas' collection, which includes paintings by Norman Rockwell and other realist artists, movie memorabilia including "Star Wars" objects and digital art. Ramps outside the dome would lead to four levels of galleries above.
Designs of the galleries, which will be flexible, "black box" spaces with minimal natural light, were not released Monday.
The interior would also include four movie theaters (two large and two small), archives, offices, an education center, the sixth-floor restaurant and the seventh-floor observation deck. Windows sliced into the museum's facade would allow for views of the lakefront and the downtown skyline.
At 400,000 square feet, the museum would be about four times the size of the 93,000-square-foot building Lucas planned in San Francisco. That building, with two tall stories, was to have been about 65 feet tall compared with 110 feet for the structure proposed in Chicago.
For Ma, founder of the firm MAD Architects, who has won international recognition for museums in his native China and the curvaceous "Marilyn Monroe" residential towers near Toronto, Monday's unveiling represented a striking professional turnabout.
In 2000, before he began graduate studies at Yale's architecture school, he was a summer employee at the office of Chicago architect Helmut Jahn. During that summer, he recalled Monday, he once walked along the lakefront from Lincoln Park to the site now proposed for the Lucas Museum, taking in fireworks and food festivals. Now he is designing a major building on a choice waterfront site.
"It's not about me," he said Monday of his design. "You already have so much great architecture" in Chicago. The idea "was to create a future architecture for Chicago," one, he said, that would create harmony "between the person and the landscape."
The Chicago Plan Commission will be among the city bodies reviewing the Lucas Museum's plans. Lakefront protectionists have argued that the museum should be located at another site. They have cited the 1973 Lakefront Protection Ordinance, which calls for Chicago to protect the shoreline's open character.
Twitter @BlairKamin