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Sketches Released of New Star Wars Museum
An anonymous reader writes Chicago has some great museums, but none have architecture that excite me as much as the renderings (read "storyboards, not blueprints," but they're also called "plans," which I hope means they're pretty accurate) of George Lucas's Star Wars museum. Technically, it's the "George Lucas Museum of Narrative Art," but we know what he means, and these pictures only make the point clearer. Says the Associated Press story, "The Beijing-based principal designer, Ma Yansong of MAD Architects, released the first sketches Tuesday. The seven-story museum will be located between Soldier Field and McCormick Place on Lake Michigan. It's expected to cost about $400 million. Ma has said it's the most important project of his career to date."
"most important project of his career to date."
George Lucas Museum of Narrative Art
I bet I'll be the only person in the "More American Graffiti" and "Willow" section.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
I was expecting something that resembled the Deathstar, complete with a 3-meter wide exhaust port.
the renderings (read "storyboards, not blueprints," but they're also called "plans,"
What about "tapes"? Though I'm surprised they're not more secret, so they won't fall into the wrong hands.
And is there any sort of contingency in case someone steals them?
I wonder how much of the cost the people of Chicago are going to have to pony up.
[Jedi mind trick] It won't cost anything you anything. You should support it.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
That style of swoopy curvy blob may have looked "futuristic" back in the 50's and 60's when it first debuted... now it just looks old, tired, derivative, and lame.
Looks more like Star Trek style architecture with is curved and clean look then Star Wars style. It even had a saucer section on top.
First that spaceship crashed into Soldier Field and now this.
If Chicago doesn't change parties, either libertarian, GOP, green, anything really, the city is never going to be relevant again. Too much corruption and stupid projects. We have terrible roads to get anywhere, awful schools, and a joke of a county hospital system.
Oh, but hey, shiny bean.
Hoist Number One and Number Six.
$400m dollars? I get the whole preserving your legacy thing, and it's his money he can do what he wants I guess...but is there nothing better that he could put $400m towards that will actually do the world good?
What the US badly needs is a museum for War Stars.
Alfred E. Neuman,
Star Wars has been dead for 30 years.
Lucas had ONE great film in his entire career (Star Wars). The 2 worthy sequels were handled primarily by other people, and everything else he's involved himself in has been utter trash.
The same is true of Ridley Scott. Responsible for 1 great film (Alien) and attached to 1 (Blade Runner) that was great despite him fumbling about repeatedly and causing it to be a commercial failure and canonical mess.
As for James Cameron, he had 3 great films (Terminator, Terminator 2, and The Abyss), with a couple good films (Aliens and True Lies). He went full retard with Titanic and it, along with everything has has since or will put out, is shit shit shit.
While we're at it I'll say that Peter Jackson had 0 great movies. His Lord of the Rings adaptations are long and fucking boring (just like the books, but that's beside the point). While I enjoyed the first film the first time through (none of this uber-extended horseshit), the second 2 were simply unbearable. I tries again with the 2 Hobbit films and shit was worse. At least LotR had a mildly interesting plot and actors were acting with each other present. The Hobbit films are just showpieces for shitty 3D, and shitty 48 fps first, to the point where Ian McKellan broke down crying, wanting to quit the films because he was acting in a green box staring a postage stamp sized picture of the other actors eyes. (For the framerate, he should have gone with 60 so it could display on TVs properly, be reduced to 30 for BluRay and be displayed on TVs properly, etc. - all major theaters capably of 48 fps digital projection would have handled 60.) And of course, Avatar was shit shit shit. And we're getting 3 more of them! King Kong was good. Too long, as usual, but good (not great). Surprisingly, Jack Black did his role justice and wasn't a complete clown, as I expected.
Living near and often visiting Chicago and it's lake front... I can attest to the fact that the absolute last thing it needs is yet another useless modern art building at the expense of Grass and trees. I have friends and family that live in Chicago, and all of their yards are spotty grass, fence, spotty grass, fence, alley, fence, spotty grass... for miles and mile and miles. They visit the lakefront parks weekly so as not to shoot themselves in the head after realizing that they indeed moved to a dystopian urban nightmare with a higher murder rate than Afghanistan.
One more building with nothing interesting in it will do no-one any good.
$50-$75 a day to park.
Good luck keeping kids with skateboards off of it.
That's not anything like a Mies van der Rohe building. Rohe was a form-follows-function glass box architect. He did some of the best glass boxes of the 20th century, notably the IIT campus in Chicago. His work is very rectangular.
Wright did more unusual forms. In his later years, he designed the Marin Civic Center which Lucas, being from Marin, would have seen. It's been called the Martian Embassy. It's so alien it's been used in several science fiction movies. Like most Wright buildings, it's nicely integrated with the terrain.
Here's the park that must be destroyed to build to satisify Lucas' ego.
To finish this ?
I have to resist the temptation to view the pictures. I want want to be surprised when I experience it in person.
From TFA:
Does that mean Chicago is a wretched hive of scum and villainy?
Unless there's an opening day being announced, this is just pie in the sky.
Damn them.
This completely violates our historical treatment of the lakefront for the past 100 years and has been specifically forbidden since the 70's. They are putting it right between the only other two structures which do the same thing. We've had two mayors in a row who do not understand the lakefront and it's role in Chicago, or who just don't give a crap. Daniel Burnham would have reamed them a new one. If they want 7 stories, they're welcome to it, but only if they dig 5 stories down.
Furthermore, this placement of a major draw right between two other major draws is a great idea, because transit to the other two venues already doesn't work. Let's make it worse. Brilliant. They currently have one train which stops right nearby which isn't connected to the rest of the transit system, and another train which is connected but which doesn't come close enough for most people to consider taking it. There's parking all around and it all exits into a small area of road, so that traffic gets to be a nightmare around these two venues.
Yeah, let's add another. And let's make it so tall it blots out the lake.
Bastards.
Hopefully friends of the park will sue them into submission. Put this damn thing on the other side of the drive. It's so tall it won't matter where you put it anyway. Hell, it's so big you could run I55 right through it.
Suit yourself. As a San Franciscan I'm disappointed we weren't able to keep Lucas and this Museum; it actually looks incredible and I wish we would have been able to have it.
I wonder how much of the cost the people of Chicago are going to have to pony up.
[Jedi mind trick] It won't cost anything you anything. You should support it.
Side note, but what happens when a Jedi using the mind trick uses bad grammar, confusing the target?
Of the Museum, with some Tour Guide action figures
XDInd
Urban residents almost never use our parks.
Once you have real places to go, wasting your time looking at a grass garden seems pointless. Build the funny building.
I got a bad feeling about this.
The Aldera design is even in the same color scheme, except it doesn't suck as architecture (implemented McQuarrie designs tend to lose the That 70's Look of his paint). Here's the deal - windows make for free light for a whole bunch of exhibits (put the dark ones in the center), normal humans enjoy bright and sunny places, and they also enjoy non-creepy architecture as well.
The proposed design looks like the Taelon embassy tried to assimilate a circus tent, and - what is that, a golden halo on top of the Lucas building? Are we not supposed to take this as a literal edifice to ego?
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
One thing it will cost is the deal that no new construction will happen at the lakefront. It is supposed to be park land open to the public. There is almost sure to be a lawsuit to prevent it being built east of Lake Shore Drive. Montgomery Ward was instrumental in creating that precedent, which has, nevertheless, been violated several times.
Wake me when they build a Star Trek museum. Star Wars is batting 0.333 at best, which is great for baseball but pretty shitty for a film franchise. There's what, over 700 Star Trek episodes and at least 11 films? That's no museum; that's a waste of space and money.
Buy your next Linux PC at eightvirtues.com
Here is a sampling:
Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, 17 Works of Art That Will Hang In George Lucas's New Museum
''Vanity projects'' are nothing new in America, where the arts are driven primarily by private, not public, funds. Old-school, philanthropic museums were themselves public monuments to their founders' savvy. They were also, a tastemaking project by nouveau riche American tycoons: When the Industrial Revolution triggered fears that the growing immigrant workforce would prevent America from developing a highbrow culture like Europe's, the wealthy fought the perceived onslaught by funding institutes filled with old-world classics to educate the people's taste, to help them identify with the values of the successful industrialists.
Today's benefactors buy and preserve what they consider purely American art. Private collectors in the past few decades have been stealthily accumulating valuable holdings in order to tell their versions of the country's art history. Each in their own way are making a bid to define what art is in America and what it has been in the 150 years.
There's a fittingly egalitarian spirit to this latest wave of museum openings. The Rubell Family Collection opened shop in Miami's rundown Wynwood neighborhood to display the kind of avant-garde works usually found in high-end art galleries. Perhaps even more daring is Crystal Bridges, Walmart heiress Alice Walton's passion project that brought Lichtenstein and Warhol to a small town in the Ozarks. Costing a reported $1.2 billion to open in 2011, Crystal Bridges doesn't charge for admission, a fact that conveys the belief that art, like music and literature, is not a recreational luxury or the purview of the rich. Rather, it is an essential tool that helps awaken and direct talent whose development is essential to society, especially a democratic one.
George Lucas's Art Museum: His Best Idea Since Star Wars