MAD Architects' Ma Yansong has roiled the waters of Chicago's design scene with his proposal for George Lucas's museum. But does it really pose such a threat to the city's lakefront?

Image courtesy Lucas Museum of Narrative Art-MAD’s controversial design for the Lucas Museum sits on the shore of Lake Michigan with the city as a backdrop. Studio Gang will design the landscape, while VOA Associates will serve as executive architect.

text by Michael Sorkin

I've always been partial to architectural mountains—from the Mayans to Bruno Taut—so I was delighted to see the hilly design that Beijing-based MAD Architects has proposed for the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art in Chicago. Others were less so. These included Friends of the Park, a nonprofit group, which, alarmed that the parking-lot site would not remain “open space,” immediately filed a lawsuit, and Blair Kamin, the Chicago Tribune critic who, citing unsourced “widespread public revulsion,” denounced the structure's mountainessness, blobbiness, starchitecturality, abstraction, and resem- blance to (quick, a Star Wars image!) the “bloated” Jabba the Hutt, with his “leering, reptilian eyes.” Yikes, that line between geomorphs and biomorphs can be tricky! In a subsequent article, Kamin suggested what he felt to be a better site, a few blocks away, one somewhat more constraining and linear, perhaps better able to accommodate a replica of a recumbent Carrie Fisher......Continue Reading

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