With this proposal, MAD moves away from the conventional image of the museum as an autonomous, enclosed volume, instead developing an organic and continuous geometry consistent with a line of research the studio has pursued for years through fluid and topographic forms. Here, this investigation takes shape in a building without straight lines that seeks to blur the boundaries between architecture and its surroundings, creating an architectural experience that begins before entering the interior.
The proposal originated in the competition won by MAD in 2014 to build the museum in Chicago, where the studio had already developed an organic, topographic volume in dialogue with the landscape along the shore of Lake Michigan. After that site was abandoned in 2016, Los Angeles was finally selected in January 2017. The proposal for Exposition Park retained the same formal logic, adapting it to the conditions of its new context while undergoing a substantial transformation in its architectural expression.
Lucas Museum of Narrative Art by MAD Architects. Photograph by Hufton+Crow. Courtesy of Lucas Museum of Narrative Art.
At its new site, the building rises at the centre of the plot and touches the ground only at certain points, freeing the space beneath it as a large sheltered public plaza. A system of central steel arches spans approximately 56 metres (185 feet) and connects the north and south entrances. Four stories above the plaza, a large elliptical oculus cuts through the volume, establishing a direct relationship between the public space and the sky.
The envelope is formed by more than 1,200 curved fiberglass-reinforced polymer (FRP) panels, each with a specific geometry. Their low weight and ability to adapt to double-curved surfaces make it possible to materialise a continuous skin. Parametric modelling was a decisive tool in formalising the museum, allowing its complex geometries to be controlled, proportions and dimensions to be adjusted, and the different stages of development between architecture, structure and construction to be coordinated.
Lucas Museum of Narrative Art by MAD Architects. Photograph by Hufton+Crow. Courtesy of Lucas Museum of Narrative Art.
Inside, more than 9,300 square metres are devoted to exhibition spaces organised across more than thirty galleries. The lower levels accommodate much of the complementary public programme: two cinemas, ten studios and classrooms, a shop and café, as well as a gallery of approximately 930 square metres (10,000 square feet). Among these spaces is the library, with a horseshoe-shaped configuration opening towards the park. The library extends across two additional levels, reinforcing the visual relationship between the interior spaces and the landscape.
Lucas Museum of Narrative Art by MAD Architects. Photograph by Hufton+Crow. Courtesy of Lucas Museum of Narrative Art.
This continuity extends into the campus designed by Studio-MLA, transforming an area previously occupied by asphalt parking lots into a new system of public spaces and landscaped areas. The park’s topography incorporates more than 300 newly planted trees, native and drought-tolerant species, a meadow, an amphitheatre, a hanging garden and a fountain conceived as a large waterfall. The landscape draws on California’s geographical and botanical diversity, with jacarandas, oaks, pines, meadows, shrubs and flowering plants forming a vegetation system developed according to environmental criteria.
Lucas Museum of Narrative Art by MAD Architects. Photograph by Hufton+Crow. Courtesy of Lucas Museum of Narrative Art.
Ma Yansong conceives architecture and landscape as a single spatial construction. The elevated volume, covered plaza, oculus, terraces and landscaped topography articulate a continuous sequence of interior and exterior spaces in which the building gradually loses its condition as an isolated object. The Lucas Museum is thus conceived simultaneously as a museum and as public infrastructure, adding a new cultural facility to the fabric of Exposition Park.
