Lucas' architect choice for Chicago light years from S.F. vision

If George Lucas indeed builds his vanity museum in Chicago, San Francisco's contribution may be that we helped nudge the "Star Wars" creator out of his aesthetic comfort zone for the first time since he started making sequels to his sequels and re-releasing his re-releases.

That's the intriguing twist to last week's announcement of a design team for the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art on the shores of Lake Michigan. The lead designer will be MAD Architects, a Chinese firm whose lone North American project is a pair of curvaceous residential towers in metropolitan Toronto that could be squeezed metallic toothpaste tubes.

It's hard to imagine a style less like the theme-park classicism that Lucas offered up last fall when seeking to erect and endow a home for his collection of illustrative art at Crissy Field in the Presidio. When decision-makers turned him down after a combustive public competition, Lucas and his $700 million collection were lured to Chicago.

Because of this, some observers in the design world speculate that Lucas is an architectural agnostic. Metropolis Magazine's executive editor, Martin Pedersen, used the word "situational" in a blog post last week to describe the filmmaker's "remarkably flexible taste."

Instead, Pedersen suggested, "He just wants to get the damn thing approved. In architecture-adverse San Francisco - especially in the Presidio - that meant classical architecture."

When I sought to discuss the design shift with Lucas' press team Tuesday, the response via e-mail was a polite, "We decline to comment at this time and will let you know when that changes."

My guess, though, is that the creative vision pursued at Crissy Field is the one dear to Lucas' heart.

The evidence is in the structures that Lucas built for his cinematic empire before selling Lucasfilm to Disney in 2012 for $4 billion.

The Marin resident billed himself as "primary conceptual designer" in press materials for the 2005 opening of his Letterman Digital Arts Center at the Presidio - a 23-acre complex that includes four oversize but immensely tasteful office buildings clad in red brick and white stucco, earnest updates of the military architecture nearby. Skywalker Ranch and Big Rock Ranch in Marin are detailed evocations of a genteel rural West, inflated to studio size.

"There's nothing wrong with replicating old architecture," Lucas told the New York Times in September as he prepared to release his Crissy Field design. "Basically, all of Washington is a mimic of the past."

See the original post here:
Lucas' architect choice for Chicago light years from S.F. vision