Fresh off his rave reviews for designing the Met’s “Manus x Machina” exhibition and the Pierre Lassonde Pavilion in Quebec City , OMA New York head architect Shohei Shigematsu has unveiled his version of the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, an institution being developed by legendary film director George Lucas. The proposed structure was devised in 2014 for Lucas, who was eyeing a prime lakefront spot just south of Chicago’s Soldier Field for the campus. Several firms competed for the commission, and Lucas ended up not selecting OMA’s museum-in-the-sky concept, instead favoring an undulating edifice from MAD Architects . OMA decided to release the never-before-seen renderings following last month’s announcement that the project is abandoning its plans in the Windy City and heading to the West Coast.
Designed by Shigematsu, the submission features an atrium tower and an elevated gallery plate, both wrapped in a translucent membrane made from ETFE, a high-performance fluoropolymer film. The resulting “sky park” was intended to function year-round as an enclosed gathering space, where even screenings could take place thanks to the dome’s fritted skin. The elevated nature of the gallery plate meant that the museum offered “eight times the public space it occupies,” the firm noted in the original design description. “Lifting the main galleries preserves the site below as a new urban park, while simultaneously providing for maximum flexibility within the horizontal gallery plate itself.”
A closer view of the proposal.
Moving on from its Chicago plans, the museum is now eyeing locations in California, including sites in the Los Angeles area and an island in the San Francisco Bay.
