“George and Mellody’s idea was to bring people, especially young people, together in a democratic, non-exclusionary way, to make them eager to see what’s inside this building,” Ma says of his early inspiration. “My design tries to engage those people through atmosphere and emotions, not architecture.” Spanning 300,000 square feet, his five-story scheme is a tour de force of biomorphic engineering, utilising more than 1,500 individually crafted panels of curved fibreglass-reinforced polymer. Dramatic cantilevers allow the building to meet the ground delicately, as if the structure were floating above the site. The seeming effortlessness conceals the cutting-edge structural acrobatics that nurture the illusion of buoyancy. “The building acts like a canopy or shade tree that creates a place for people to gather and explore,” Ma says of the ground-level experience, which is designed to weave the museum into the adjacent gardens and broader Exposition Park campus.
The entry to the museum, a covered plaza crowned with an elliptical oculus, serves as a gateway to exposition park.
Visitors enter the building through a covered courtyard plaza crowned with a dramatic elliptical oculus that frames a view to the sky. The calculated synthesis of indoor and outdoor, nature and culture, extends to the roof of the museum, which is covered in an undulating, amoebic topography of plants, trees, and solar arrays. The extraordinary level of detail within the building, from the gift shop kiosks to the radiused elevator cabs, testifies to the care and cost that Lucas, Hobson, and their designers lavished on the project. “These are not the kind of details you find in a shopping mall, but we didn’t want them to be too obtrusive,” Ma says. “The details are meant to spark curiosity while still feeling organic.”
The site’s extensive gardens by Studio-MLA are “designed to extend the museum’s mission beyond the walls of the building,” according to Lehrer, again stressing the project’s core goals of popular engagement and community uplift. “George’s movies always have these experiences that allow people to travel, and here we wanted to celebrate the great spectrum of California geography with references to meadows, valleys, foothills, canyons, and springs,” she says. “This is not a flat park. It’s a series of land forms that rise, fold, and move around the architecture.” Highlights of the plan include a hanging garden, an amphitheater for performances, a garden with monumental sculptures of Star Wars characters and iconic figures like Rosie the Riveter, and a rain fountain that doubles as a renewable cooling mechanism for the building.
Vaulted spaces and radiused edges on the interior underscore the organic architecture.