The Lucas Museum of Narrative Artwork, rising on what was a parking zone in Exposition Park in downtown L.A., is dedicated to visible storytelling: the comics of Charles M. Schulz (“Peanuts”) and Alex Raymond (“Flash Gordon”), film idea artwork by Neal Adams (“Batman”) and Ralph McQuarrie (“Star Wars”), work by Frida Kahlo and Jacob Lawrence, images by Gordon Parks and Dorothea Lange, illustrations by Norman Rockwell and N.C. Wyeth.
So when George Lucas and spouse Mellody Hobson selected Mia Lehrer and her L.A. agency, Studio-MLA, to design the 11 acres of panorama round — and on prime of — MAD Architects’ swirling, otherworldly, billion-dollar constructing, the driving forces behind the Lucas Museum made it clear that the panorama needed to inform a narrative too.
Lehrer and her crew studied how administrators, illustrators and painters use topography to assist amplify, amongst different issues, emotion, sequence and storyline.
A protracted stretch of park area extends from the Lucas Museum of Narrative Artwork, which sits subsequent to the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum.
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Occasions)
“We looked at the landscapes of myths and movies,” mentioned Kush Parekh, a principal at Studio-MLA. “How do you take someone on a journey through space? How does the terrain change the story — and how can it be the story?”
The consequence — which feels surprisingly grown-in regardless that the museum gained’t open till subsequent 12 months — is a sinuous, eclectic panorama that unfolds in discrete vignettes, all selling exploration and distinct expertise. Every zone comprises various textures, colours, scales and infrequently framed views. A shaded walkway curls alongside a meandering meadow and lifts you towards a hilly canyon. A footbridge carries you above a growing conifer thicket. A plant-covered trellis, referred to as “the hanging garden,” offers a extra compressed second of pause. The atmosphere, like a superb story, frequently shifts tone and tempo.
“It’s episodic,” Parekh mentioned. “Each biome reveals something new, each path hints at what’s ahead without giving it away.”
A key theme of the story is the varied terrain of California — a spot that, in Lehrer’s phrases, “contains more varied environments in a single day’s drive than most countries do in a week.” Foothills and valleys, groves and canyons, even the mesas, plateaus and plains of the Sierra and the Central Valley — Lehrer calls all of it a “choreography of place.”
Lucas Museum employees and design crew stand below the trellis of “the hanging garden.”
One other, extra delicate, layer of this narrative is time. Plantings had been laid out to bloom in numerous seasons and elsewhere. Brilliant yellow “Safari Goldstrike” leucadendron, edging the meadow and canyon, come alive in late winter and early spring. Tall jacarandas, spied from a foothills overlook, emerge then shortly disappear. “Bee’s Bliss” sage, mendacity low within the oak woodland, flip lavender blue within the early summer time. One thing is all the time rising, one thing else fading.
“Every month, every visit, feels different,” Parekh mentioned.
Even the alpine-inspired plantings cladding the museum’s roof — colourful wildflowers, lengthy sweeping grasses and coarse scrubs, all chosen for his or her hardiness, lightness and shallow roots — observe this rhythm.
“They’re alive. They change. They move with the climate,” Lehrer mentioned.
The panorama creates the phantasm that some plantings run proper as much as the museum. Right here, the black void on the underside of the constructing is the opening for an enormous waterfall that can cascade to a pool beneath.
(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Occasions)
The grounds embody the terraced seating of an amphitheater.
(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Occasions)
The plant palette contains low-water alternatives.
(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Occasions)
Amazingly, the remainder of the panorama is a sort of inexperienced roof as effectively, sitting atop a 2,400-spot underground parking construction — out there to these visiting the Lucas or any of Expo Park’s different establishments. Wedged between the greenery and the parking are 1000’s of froth blocks, blended with soil and sculpted to type the panorama whereas minimizing weight on the constructing beneath.
“I wish I had invested in foam before we started this,” joked Angelo Garcia, president of Lucas Actual Property Holdings. “It’s everywhere. These mountains were created with foam.”
“It’s full-scale ecology sitting on top of a structural system,” famous Michael Siegel, senior principal at Stantec, the museum’s architect of file, liable for its technical oversight and implementation.
“That’s how the best storytelling works,” Lehrer added. “You don’t see the mechanics. You just feel the effect.”
Foam blocks buried within the soil form the terrain whereas minimizing weight on the parking construction beneath.
(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Occasions)
As you make your manner by the rolling panorama, it turns into clear that it’s additionally crafted to meld with MAD’s sculptural design — a hovering, eroded type, itself impressed by the clouds, hills and different pure types of Los Angeles.
“There’s a dialogue,” Garcia mentioned.
Paths bend as a substitute of minimize; curving benches — forged in clean, gently tapering concrete — echo the museum’s fiber-reinforced cement roofline. Bridges arc gently over bioswales and berms. Ramps rise like extensions of the constructing’s base. Paving stones mirror the colour and texture of the museum’s facade.
“It was never landscape next to building,” Lehrer mentioned. “It was building as landscape, and landscape as structure. One continuous form.”
Nearer to the constructing, the place a fringe mass damper system that the design crew has nicknamed the “moat” protects the museum from seismic exercise, panorama nestles towards, and seemingly below, the construction’s edges, additional blurring the barrier between the 2. Rows of mature bushes being planted now will assist soften the flanks. Vines will hold from the Lucas’ floating oculus, proper above its entry court docket.
The constructing’s oculus ultimately may have vines hanging from it.
(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Occasions)
The Lucas Museum of Narrative Artwork rises in Exposition Park, its rooftop clad with photo voltaic panels and gardens, the skyline of downtown Los Angeles rising behind it.
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Occasions)
A employee on the inexperienced rooftop of the museum.
(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Occasions)
The topography was designed to attenuate environmental affect. A whole lot of vegetation, principally native to the area, are drought-tolerant (or a minimum of require little watering). A rain-harvesting system captures water for irrigation. And on the north fringe of the museum shall be “The Rain,” a waterfall that doubles as a passive cooling system, changing conventional air-conditioning infrastructure. (Dozens of underground geothermal wells present extra cooling.)
On this a part of South L.A., park area is egregiously scarce, a remnant of redlining and disinvestment. This area — set to be open to the general public with no ticket, from daybreak to nightfall — is a recreation changer, as is an enormous inexperienced area on Expo Park’s south aspect that additionally replaces a floor parking zone and tops an underground storage. (That latter mission has been delayed till after the 2028 Olympics.)
“It’s hotter, it’s denser and it’s long been overlooked. We wanted to change that,” Lehrer mentioned of the world.
What was as soon as a walled-off asphalt lot is a porous public area, linking Expo Park to the remainder of the neighborhood through its 4 east-west pathways and opening connections on the north aspect to Jesse Brewer Jr. Park, which the Lucas Museum has paid to improve. The museum additionally funded the creation to the south of the brand new Soboroff Sports activities Discipline, which replaces a subject that was adjoining to the location’s parking zone. The Lucas’ round plaza and amphitheater with seating for tons of, have the potential not solely to host museum occasions but in addition to change into fashionable neighborhood gathering spots.
Kush Parekh, left, and Mia Lehrer of Studio-MLA.
(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Occasions)
Treetops rising alongside the museum’s curvaceous silhouette.
(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Occasions)
For Lehrer, the panorama is a convergence of civic and ecological concepts that she’s developed all through her profession — actually ever since an opportunity encounter with the intricate authentic drawings for Central Park whereas she was finding out on the Harvard Graduate Faculty of Design spurred her to pivot from planning to panorama structure. At this level, she’s created arguably extra main new public areas in Los Angeles than some other designer, together with two vibrantly didactic landscapes on the adjoining Pure Historical past Museum of Los Angeles, downtown’s 10-acre Vista Hermosa Park and the artfully layered grounds and lake surrounding SoFi Stadium.
“This brings everything together,” she mentioned. “Design, ecology, storytelling, infrastructure, community. It’s the fullest expression of what landscape can be.”
Lehrer credit Lucas with not simply allowing her to discover these concepts however encouraging her to push them additional. Lucas supported the uncommon — and expensive — set up of mature plantings. Often the panorama is the final a part of a constructing to emerge.
The progress within the grounds is a shiny spot for the museum, which has been grappling with development delays, the shock departure of its government director and, most not too long ago, the layoffs of 15 full-time and 7 part-time staff, a part of a restructuring {that a} museum official mentioned was “to ensure we open on time next year.”
As the brand new constructing accelerates towards that opening, the imaginative and prescient outdoors is turning into extra clear.
George Lucas, heart, spouse Mellody Hobson and then-Mayor Eric Garcetti because the Lucas Museum started development in 2019.
(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Occasions)
“To have an open-minded client, who gets landscape and also appreciates creativity, it’s rare,” Lehrer mentioned. Lucas, who grew up on a farm in Modesto, has been growing the vineyards, gardens and olive groves of his Skywalker Ranch in Northern California for many years.
“I have always wanted to be surrounded by trees and nature,” Lucas mentioned. “The museum’s backyard is meant to provide a respite in a hectic world.”
