A new Vogue feature provides an early look inside the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, set to open on September 22 this year in Los Angeles. Writer Nathan Heller, accompanied by co-founders George Lucas and Mellody Hobson, toured the facility to examine its core mission: exploring how narrative and storytelling have influenced human experience across history and culture.
The extensive article, accompanied by photography from Annie Leibovitz, offers the first public glimpse into the museum’s interior galleries and its planned inaugural exhibitions. Heller describes the structure as an “otherworldly architecture landmark,” emphasizing its focus on the power of popular stories as an organizing force in culture.
The structure where we find ourselves is towering with rich wood paneling and almost entirely devoid of right angles. Its ceiling sweeps down; its grand staircases twist. A set of central elevators are threaded through glass tubes. The museum’s façade—its carapace, really—was designed using a process called parametric modeling, which enables its shape to be molded like Play-Doh. It was assembled around an internal skeleton from 1,500 school-bus-size fiberglass panels, each fitted into place, like three-dimensional puzzle pieces, by human crews. “It’s a piece of modern architecture so of its time that you couldn’t have built it 15 years ago,” Michael Siegel, a principal at Stantec architecture and a leader of the project on site, tells me. Yet the effect is classically Californian in its balance of tech futurism and organicity, bringing to mind the designs of Apple’s heyday: openness and compactness, something cool and something warm. The building looks as if it might stretch and lumber off at any moment, like one of Lucas’s fantastical creatures.