Lucas Museum of Narrative Art

George Lucas spent a decade and a billion dollars finding a home for his art collection, and it’s finally about to open. The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art is set to welcome the public on September 22, 2026, in Los Angeles’s Exposition Park. The building, a curved, cloud-like form by MAD Architects, has topped out and is deep into interior fit-out.

Project Scope

Ma Yansong of MAD designed the 300,000-square-foot museum on an 11-acre site that used to be surface parking. Stantec serves as executive architect, Studio-MLA (Mia Lehrer) handled the landscape, and Hathaway Dinwiddie is the general contractor. The sculpted, largely column-free form lifts the galleries above new public parkland, trading asphalt for green space in a park that already holds the Coliseum and two major museums. Construction started back in spring 2017; the pandemic and supply-chain delays pushed the original 2021 opening out by five years, and the final cost lands around $1 billion.

Why It Matters

Narrative art, illustration, comics, film, the work usually shut out of fine-art museums, gets a flagship here, funded almost entirely by Lucas and Mellody Hobson rather than public money. For Los Angeles, it’s a billion-dollar cultural anchor and a rare privately funded museum at this scale. For the field, MAD’s design argues that a museum can be the exhibit too, joining destination institutions like the Grand Egyptian Museum and Hong Kong’s M+ in betting that architecture pulls visitors as hard as the collection inside.

Project Team & Details