Look, over there on the lakefront! It's a volcano! It's a flying saucer landing on Space Mountain! It's ... a museum?
We knew that George Lucas had agreed to build his long-delayed art museum in Chicago, after the Presidio Trust in San Francisco nixed his plans for the project in his home city. What we didn't know until this week was what it would look like.
The San Francisco version of Lucas's museum, which focuses on narrative art and digital cinema, was supposed to be a very traditional Beaux Arts-style homage, one that hearkened back to the city's legendary Pan-Pacific exposition. In other words, something like this:
Evidently that's not what the Star Wars creator had in mind for his second-choice city. Beijing's appropriately-named MAD unveiled a breathtakingly futuristic design late Monday, which couldn't look more different if it tried:
Remind you of anything? Apparently, the 400,000-square foot building that reaches 110 feet is something of a Rorschach test for observers. We looked at it and saw Space Mountain (and we weren't alone; Time Out Chicago independently drew the same connection). Elevate the looping track around the top of Space Mountain, and the designs would look very similar indeed.
This may not be so much of a surprise if you consider Lucas's long-held love of all things Disney: He visited Disneyland the second day it opened, and built the first Star Tours ride near Space Mountain back in 1987. And of course, the company he devoted his life to building, Lucasfilm, ended up in Disney's hands.
But the design has angered many architects, architectural critics and locals. A group called Friends of the Park suggested it might mount a lawsuit to stop the construction. A commenter on one of the world's most-visited architecture websites, Arch Daily, called it "the laziest piece of architecture of the last decade." Many were unsure what a mountain had to do with the Windy City:
Chicago to get its own mountain...or maybe it's a volcano with that ring of smoke at the top http://t.co/pcRvozf2fw pic.twitter.com/jWu8Ku53TA— Sustainable Chicago (@SustainableChi) November 4, 2014
Wow!! Check out Chicago's new George Lucas museum design -- critics brand it an 'amorphous, land-eating colossus.' http://t.co/5VEPwhEcdM— Matier and Ross (@matierandross) November 4, 2014
Some critics saw more of a monstrous side to the building:
Hmmmmm.......Was Jabba the Hutt lurking in George Lucas' mind when he and his architect were working on this design? pic.twitter.com/OTmOfQFnVE— Blair Kamin (@BlairKamin) November 3, 2014
Evidently Lucas couldn't escape the Star Wars references. Popular Mechanics compared the museum design to Cloud City, while others saw even stranger similarities:
Design for George Lucas' art museum: trooper helmet with Millennium Falcon on the top http://t.co/jZI8Q1n5tQ via @dezeen— Ginger Jerome (@GingerJer) November 4, 2014
Just us, or do early @lucasmuseum renderings look straight out of the Republic of Alderaan? http://t.co/GZTFV1fzkA pic.twitter.com/ZrpoDKkyLW— DNAinfo.com Chicago (@DNAinfoCHI) November 4, 2014
@DNAinfoCHI @lucasmuseum Worse than I could have possibly imagined. Not up to Chicago architectural standards, does not belong on the lake.— Shari Palmer (@ShariKPalmer) November 4, 2014
Lucas Museum rolls out a design R2-D2 would pan http://t.co/fccEzZHTd5 via @crainschicago— Betsy Maddox (@BetsyLMaddox) November 4, 2014
Then there were a few less flattering comparisons:
Great. An Intergalactic Zit. http://t.co/8TnBssqRAC pic.twitter.com/MT0dABnwtA— Matt Walberg (@mattwalberg1) November 4, 2014
@GregHinz - The Lucas Museum design looks like it's capped with a toilet seat.— Chris Provenzano (@ChrisProvenzano) November 4, 2014
But the museum was not without its supporters. Lucas, for one, has called such "organic architecture" the "wave of the future." The architect who designed it, Ma Yansong, suggested he had millennials in mind. "We want to create a destination, to really attract a lot of young people to come and explore." And indeed, many of those young Chicagoans didn't see what all the fuss was about: To them, the design just looked cool.
Is it really just me who thinks the Lucas Museum *should* look all sci-fi and space-agey? http://t.co/5j3pSZjkji— Laurel Miltner (@laurelmackenzie) November 4, 2014
What do you think of the Lucas Narrative Arts Museum design? Let us know in the comments.