UPD 2017-11-01: Museum will be built in Los Angeles.
A new stage has begun in the history of the creation of a museum by film director George Lucas for his collection of fine art and various cinematic exhibits. In June of this year, Lucas announced that he was stopping attempts to place a museum in Chicago due to the opposition of local activists, and now he presented to the public two new projects at once - for Los Angeles and San Francisco. Which of the cities he will choose will become known at the beginning of 2017.
The architect remains the same: this is Ma Yansong and his Beijing office MAD. The locations are Treasure Island, an artificial "Treasure Island" in the San Francisco Bay, and the Exposition Park in Los Angeles.
Treasure Island, created for the 1939 World's Fair, is now planned to be occupied by a variety of new developments, and a museum will become part of it. It is planned to be located on the ocean side, where there are strong winds, so there will not be much open spaces around, but there will be more panoramic glazing than in the Exhibition Park, which is more favorable in terms of natural conditions. The total area of the building will be 24.6-25.5 thousand m2, the size of the exhibition halls - 8360-9300 m2.
In the Los Angeles Exposition Park, the museum is proposed to be located on the parking lot: instead of it, a garage for 1,800 cars will be arranged under the building. 2.4-2.8 hectares of green spaces will appear around. The area of the museum is planned to be the same as in San Francisco.
It is important to note that the Chicago and two California options do not exhaust the history of the architectural and museum enterprise of Lucas and his wife, the chairman of the board of directors of DreamWorks Animation Mellody Hobson. At the very beginning, they wanted to build a museum in a traditionalist spirit (which corresponds to their collection, where works are extremely realistic and at the same time more popular than "highly artistic": watercolors by Beatrice Potter, paintings by Rockwell Kent, etc.) in Presidio - a new park on the site of a military base in San Francisco. Then their plan fell through due to the opposition of the park management, they took into account their mistakes, changed the Urban Design Group from Dallas to fashionable and young MAD Architects and turned their attention to the hometown of Hobson - Chicago, where they received the support of the influential and progressive mayor - Ram Emanuel … However, both options for the location of the museum on the shores of Lake Michigan - in the parking lot and in place of one of the buildings of the exhibition complex - met with stiff opposition from local Friends of Parks activists who worried that Lucas's private institution would violate the right of residents to access the coast. They immediately filed a lawsuit, and after two years of unsuccessful negotiations, Lucas announced that he was abandoning the Chicago plans.
Now he has chosen two cities at once in California, the state where he was born and lives now. The mayors of Los Angeles and San Francisco have already announced their support for the project, which, as emphasized on the museum's website, will be funded by Lucas and Hobson (the budget is more than $ 1 billion, of which not a single cent will be state), will create more than 1,500 jobs during construction and 350 after the opening of the museum. At the same time, the townspeople, including influential architectural critics, are alarmed by the private nature of the enterprise for which the state land will be allocated, as well as the lack of contextuality of Yansong's projects, which are already saturated with "attractions" for construction.
