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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."
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?
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.
Then it's the perfect look for the George Lucas Museum.
He sets 'em up and I bat 'em out, folks. We'll be here all week.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
1.8, it'll be union built in Chicago.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
George Lucas Museum of Narrative Art
I bet I'll be the only person in the "More American Graffiti" and "Willow" section.
Yes, but I'll be nearby in the "Howard the Duck" wing.
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?
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.
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.
From TFA:
Does that mean Chicago is a wretched hive of scum and villainy?
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.
I'm sorry, I really should let it go, but...
Terminator 2 was not empty. Aliens was not completely empty. The Abyss was classic start shooting before you have a script debacle. True Lies was just plain offensive. (Those movies are fundamentally about Fatherhood, Motherhood, Marriage, and Cameron not realizing that he's a dick, respectively.)
The LotR movies, including The Hobbit, all made my ass hurt. Here's a good rule of thumb: movies should not take as long to watch as it takes to read the book.
It's the budget (which you allude to above) which is the problem. For a given film-maker, pretty much the bigger the budget, the worse the movie. Peter Jackson made Meet the Feebles, for goodness, sake. When he had to scrape by, he made amazing things. Cameron and Lucas have basically the same problem.
In your comment above you say Lucas only directed one good film. This is wrong, because you've forgotten THX 1138 and American Graffiti -- neither as good as the first star wars movie, but neither as bad as anything he did after that.