The battle to build the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art has had enough twists and turns to fill a major blockbuster. The design battles, the search for a location to call it home and now the build process. Who would have thought that a billionaire wanting to bestow a billion dollar museum on a city would cause so much agro?
Vanity Fair delve into the story.
Lucas had already built an office building in 2005 for Lucasfilm (he sold the company in 2012 to Disney for just over $4 billion) on the grounds of the Presidio, a former army base that had been transformed into a national park and governed by the Presidio Trust, an organization charged with the often conflicting goals of protecting the park’s landscape and encouraging economic development. Given Lucas’s history at the Presidio and with San Francisco, it seemed natural to propose building his museum there—preferably on Crissy Field, a portion of the park along the waterfront.
“I wanted to do something modern. I wanted an iconic building like the Sydney Opera House, but they said, ‘You absolutely won’t put a modern building there,’ ” Lucas told me. He later explained to Charlie Rose that his intention had been to invite five prominent modern architects to produce designs and then select the one he liked best. Instead, he went to the Urban Design Group, a large, Dallas-based firm with which he had worked before, and asked it to produce a traditional museum design in the manner of Bernard Maybeck’s Palace of Fine Arts, a Beaux-Arts landmark on the edge of the Presidio.
And that is when things began to go south. The Urban Design Group is a commercial firm whose expertise was neither designing museums nor working in traditional architectural styles, and its scheme, as the San Francisco Chronicle critic John King wrote, “looked like a generic Spanish-themed shopping center.” It was also 69 feet high, and design guidelines set by the Presidio Trust required that buildings be no higher than 45 feet, in order to preserve views toward the Golden Gate Bridge. The trust, not wanting to turn over public land to Lucas without giving others a chance to come up with alternative proposals, put out a general call for cultural projects and received 16 submissions, all of them no higher than 45 feet. Unwilling to compromise on the design, Lucas embarked on a public-relations campaign for his museum and his vision, enlisting Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, California governor Jerry Brown, and Senator Dianne Feinstein, among others, to endorse his proposal. (Disclosure: I was asked to consult with Lucas’s organization to try to find ways to improve the building’s design, but nothing came of it.)
It’s a fascinating, albeit frustrating story that is well worth a read.
