Lucas Museum of Narrative Art

Just before architects landed in Chicago for the recent AIA National Convention, the city was making headlines with the announcement of next year's inaugural Chicago Architecture Biennial and George Lucas's selection of the city as home for the planned Lucas Museum of Narrative Art (LMNA). Chicago is taking pride in both bits of news, but the latter is particularly newsworthy due to the politics involved and how the land along the city's lakefront will be used.

In terms of the politics, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel is giving the filmmaker 17 acres of land directly south of Soldier Field, a site that is currently a parking lot, and which was selected after a task force explored numerous options in the city where Lucas lives part time. But in San Francisco, a city more strongly linked to Lucas given Lucasfilm's campuses in the area, Mayor Ed Lee's offer of a much smaller parcel of land across from the Embarcadero was too little and too late. A more desirable site in the Presidio (where Lucasfilm's Letterman Digital Arts Center is located) was denied by the Presidio Trust, which manages the land of the National Historic Landmark.

With Lucas's selection of Chicago as the site for the LMNA, two questions arise: Will locals opposed to private developments on the city's lakefront symie the plans? And who will design it? Emanuel is attempting to bypass opposition that is supported by a 1973 law that restricts private developments east of Lake Shore Drive; he claims the museum will be publicly owned by the Chicago Park District and therefore not subject to the 41-year-old law. Critic Blair Kamin is skeptical of this approach, and a number of sources indicate that Friends of the Park will most likely sue to stop the museum on that site, making the project's approval far from final.

Assuming that the political muscle required to bring the LMNA to Chicago will lead to approval of the building on the lakefront property, who designs the 95,000-square-foot building and what it will look like will then come to the fore. If Lucasfilm's campuses are any indication, the billionaire filmmaker will go with a large, corporate firm, given that Gensler designed the Letterman Digital Arts Center and Aedas designed the more futuristic Sandcrawler in Singapore. Most likely Lucas already has an architect working on plans for the museum, but locals will no doubt want to have a Chicago architect lead the design, be it Studio Gang Architects, John Ronan Architects, Krueck + Sexton Architects, or any of the other architects that must have made the city an appealing destination for the AIA National Convention this year. We will know in the fall, when renderings of the museum design are slated to be released. Stay tuned.