After more than a decade in development, the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art is preparing to open in Los Angeles on September 22, 2026. Designed by Ma Yansong of MAD with Stantec, and set within an approximately 52,600-square-meter campus landscape by Mia Lehrer of Studio-MLA, the five-story, 27,870-square-meter institution takes shape in Exposition Park as a continuous, curving volume hovering above the ground. Founded by George Lucas and Mellody Hobson, the museum will be dedicated to narrative art — images that communicate stories, beliefs and collective memory across painting, illustration, comics and cinema.
For MAD, however, the project begins before visitors encounter any of those works. Rather than treating the museum as an isolated object sitting on a conventional plinth, the architecture pulls much of its mass upward, allowing gardens, paths and sheltered public areas to continue beneath and around it. Conceived without a single straight line, the smooth exterior draws on the tree canopy of Exposition Park, producing a building that appears less deposited on the site than caught somewhere between landscape and sky. Its skin is assembled from more than 1,200 uniquely shaped curved panels of fiberglass-reinforced polymer, selected for their ability to produce the building’s flowing geometry while remaining considerably lighter than alternative materials.
all images by Hufton+Crow, courtesy of Lucas Museum, unless otherwise stated
THE MUSEUM FLOATS, THE CITY MOVES BELOW
That apparent lightness requires some fairly muscular engineering. At the center of the building, a central arch spans 56 meters to form a suspended plaza beneath the museum, creating a shaded gathering space connected to the surrounding park. From here, visitors can enter through north and south lobbies, while an elliptical Oculus hovers four stories above the plaza, opening a view from the ground toward the sky. The gesture turns what could have been the building’s most monumental moment into an absence.
Inside, the architecture becomes progressively brighter and more vertical. Sweeping arches define the main lobby, where daylight enters through large glazed openings and glass elevators carry visitors toward the galleries and restaurant above. The lower floors also contain two theaters, a horseshoe-shaped research library and learning space overlooking the park, ten studios and classrooms, a shop, café and an approximately 930-square-meter gallery. The movement through the museum is therefore not simply from room to room, but from landscape to sheltered plaza, from plaza to luminous interior, and finally upward into the exhibition spaces — a sequence that makes circulation part of the building’s storytelling.
the lucas museum rises above exposition park | image by Iwan Baan, courtesy of Lucas Museum
WHEN ROCKWELL MEETS COMICS
More than 9,290 square meters of the museum are devoted to galleries, drawing from a collection of over 40,000 works assembled by Lucas and Hobson. Its inaugural exhibitions alone will unfold across more than 30 galleries and bring together over 1,300 works. Their range deliberately collapses distinctions that museums have traditionally kept apart: paintings and popular illustration sit alongside comics, children’s books and cinematic art, with figures including Frida Kahlo, Norman Rockwell and Charles White forming part of a much wider history of images made to tell stories. The museum’s proposition is simple but surprisingly disruptive: illustration does not need rescuing from popular culture to qualify as serious art.
The curatorial structure extends that idea. Rather than primarily sorting works through movements, periods or mediums, galleries explore recognizable human themes such as family, love, work, play, childhood and adventure. A dedicated cinema installation, Star Wars in Motion, will examine vehicles from the first six films through concept designs, props and costumes, while another inaugural exhibition turns the lens back onto the building itself, presenting Ma Yansong as a narrative artist through drawings, renderings and photographs of the Lucas Museum and other MAD projects. Two cinematic theaters expand the narrative beyond static images, while a free research library, learning spaces, dining, retail and areas for public programs turn the building into something broader than a sequence of exhibition rooms. Architecture and curatorial strategy arrive at roughly the same conclusion: categories are useful, but stories have a habit of ignoring them.
MAD shapes the museum as a continuous curved volume
A 52,600-SQUARE-METER GARDEN AROUND THE ARCHITECTURE
The landscape by Studio-MLA is therefore less a decorative perimeter than the second half of the project. Gardens and planted spaces extend across the approximately 52,600-square-meter campus and slip beneath the elevated architecture, softening the conventional boundary between museum and park. Replacing what was previously an asphalt parking lot, the landscape introduces more than 300 trees alongside indigenous and drought-tolerant planting, a hanging garden, amphitheater, meadow and a fountain conceived as a dramatic waterfall. Its contoured topography draws on California’s foothills, valleys, mesas and canyons, turning the landscape itself into another form of narrative. In a part of Los Angeles already populated by major civic institutions, including the California Science Center and Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, the project uses its footprint somewhat paradoxically: building something enormous while trying to occupy as little of the ground as possible.
When the Lucas Museum opens on September 22, its collection will inevitably attract much of the attention — particularly the meeting of fine art, illustration, comics and artifacts linked to Lucas’s own cinematic universe. Ten monumental sculptures spread through the freely accessible park extend that collection outdoors, ranging from works by Fernando Botero and Prune Nourry to bronzes depicting Princess Leia, Yoda and Grogu. Yet MAD’s building makes a parallel argument through architecture. If narrative art is supposed to belong to everyday culture rather than remain trapped inside traditional hierarchies, the museum housing it cannot quite behave like an ivory tower either. Here, the tower has effectively been lifted out of the way, leaving a park underneath.
more than 1,200 curved FRP panels form the exterior
WHEN THE PEOPLE’S ART TAKES OVER
The inaugural exhibitions push that argument further, spreading narrative art across subjects and formats that rarely share the same museum floor. More than 30 galleries move between children’s literature, manga, comics and graphic stories, photography, murals, science fiction, romance and myths of the American West, alongside dedicated presentations of artists including Norman Rockwell, N.C. Wyeth, Maxfield Parrish, Frank Frazetta and Thomas Hart Benton. Other rooms turn to everyday life — childhood, family, love, school, sport and work — while works by Judith F. Baca, Diego Rivera and JR bring large-scale public storytelling into the mix. Taken together, the opening program gives architectural form to what George Lucas has described as ‘the people’s art’: images made not simply to be looked at, but to circulate, communicate and tell stories.
gardens extend beneath and around the architecture
the museum was designed without a single straight line
the central arch spans the sheltered public space
architecture and landscape are conceived as a continuous visitor experience
studio-MLA transforms the former parking lot into parkland
daylight fills the museum’s sweeping interior spaces
glass elevators connect the lower levels with the galleries
glass elevators carry visitors vertically through the museum’s light-filled interior
more than 30 galleries unfold across the museum
an elliptical oculus opens the plaza to the sky
the elliptical oculus frames a direct view from the public plaza to the sky
spaces are organized around light, movement and circulation | image by Iwan Baan
large glazed areas connect the museum with its surroundings | image by Iwan Baan, courtesy of Lucas Museum
the building’s elevated volume creates sheltered areas below | image by Iwan Baan, courtesy of Lucas Museum
the museum’s cinema spaces extend storytelling into moving images | picture by Iwan Baan
dedicated theaters offer visitors a more immersive narrative experience
Kadir Nelosn, Black Gothic, cover for Ebony, 2017. Oil on linen. © Kadir Nelson
Frida Kahlo, Autorretrato dedicado al Dr. Eloesser (Self- Portrait Dedicated to Dr. Eloesser), 1940. Oil on board. © 2026 Banco de México Diego Rivera Frida Kahlo Museums Trust, Mexico, CDMX / Artists Rights Society
project info:
project title: Lucas Museum of Narrative Art | @lucasmuseum
architecture: MAD architects | @madarchitects
location: Exposition Park, Los Angeles, California
public opening: September 22nd, 2026
previous coverage: March 2018, February 2020, September 2022, March 2024, March 2025, September 2025
The post MAD’s lucas opens in LA this month: take an early look inside appeared first on designboom | architecture & design magazine.