MAD Architects’ new museum in Los Angeles combines a futuristic floating form with gardens, public spaces and a deliberately open relationship with the city.
When the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art opens to the public on September 22, Los Angeles will gain more than a new museum. It will gain a new kind of urban landmark — one that is designed to be explored, occupied and experienced even by people who never enter its galleries.
Designed by Ma Yansong of MAD Architects, the museum rises like a vast spaceship above Exposition Park. Its sinuous form expands and contracts across the site, creating bridges, terraces and sheltered public spaces before meeting an 11-acre landscape of gardens, paths and event areas designed by Studio-MLA.
The building is unmistakably spectacular. But its real ambition lies in what happens beneath and around it.
Rather than functioning simply as an object in the landscape, Lucas is designed to become part of the landscape itself.
A building without a front
The museum belongs to the architectural tradition once known as “blobitecture” — the digitally shaped, organic architecture that became one of the defining visual languages of the 1990s and early 2000s.
That movement produced some of the era’s most recognizable cultural buildings, from Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum Bilbao to Future Systems’ Selfridges in Birmingham.
But the Lucas Museum takes the idea in a different direction.
Its irregular outline does not establish a conventional front or back. There is no single monumental façade directing visitors toward one entrance. Instead, the building encourages movement around and through it.
As visitors approach from different directions, the structure changes constantly. Its curves, openings and elevated sections create different relationships between the museum and the surrounding park.
The architecture is therefore less about presenting a single image than about creating a sequence of experiences.
The landscape is part of the museum
That relationship becomes most apparent at ground level.
By lifting much of the building above the site, MAD creates a large public court beneath it. The structure provides shade while its twisting geometry frames the space, giving the area a distinct identity without completely enclosing it.
Outside, Studio-MLA’s landscape design extends the experience through gardens, paths and gathering spaces.
The result is a museum that can be used in different ways. Visitors can come for the collection, but they can also walk through the grounds, sit beneath the building, meet friends or attend an outdoor event.
That flexibility is central to the project’s larger architectural proposition: a museum does not necessarily have to begin at its entrance.
From spectacle to civic space
The Lucas Museum arrives at a time when major cultural institutions are increasingly being asked to justify their enormous buildings and the resources devoted to them.
A spectacular structure can attract attention, but attention alone does not make a building public.
Lucas attempts to address that problem by making its surroundings an essential part of the project. The landscape is not simply decorative space around a museum; it is an extension of the institution.
The approach reflects a broader change in museum architecture, visible in projects such as Calder Gardens in Philadelphia, Crystal Bridges in Arkansas and the Amos Rex Museum in Helsinki. These institutions blur the distinction between architecture and landscape, giving visitors reasons to occupy their sites beyond simply viewing art.
Lucas pushes that idea into especially dramatic territory.
The challenge beyond the architecture
The museum’s design, however, cannot determine on its own whether the site will become a genuinely public place.
Parts of the Lucas landscape remain separated from the surrounding city by fencing, while some rooftop gardens and terraces are generally accessible only during special events or to restaurant customers.
That leaves the institution with a question that architecture alone cannot answer: how open and flexible will these spaces ultimately become?
The public will inevitably find uses for the site that its designers did not anticipate. Parks, plazas and sheltered spaces tend to develop lives of their own once people begin occupying them.
That may be the most interesting experiment at Lucas.
A new role for the architectural icon
Peter Zumthor’s David Geffen Galleries at LACMA, which opened earlier this year, offer another example of Los Angeles embracing large, fluid cultural architecture. But Lucas is particularly notable for the way it attempts to connect an unmistakably monumental building with everyday public life.
Los Angeles has no shortage of architectural icons. What it has fewer of are places where people can simply spend time together without necessarily having a specific reason to be there.
The Lucas Museum is an attempt to create one.
Its success will ultimately depend on more than its exhibitions, its futuristic silhouette or its status as a new architectural landmark. The real test will be whether Angelenos make the spaces around it their own.
The blob may be back. But at Lucas, the goal is no longer simply to make architecture look extraordinary. It is to make the extraordinary building part of ordinary urban life.
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