MAD has now revealed two new designs for its George Lucas Museum of Narrative Art

After the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art announced to leave Chicago in June, the museum released today the competing designs by MAD for both San Francisco and Los Angeles. The first is for a site on Treasure Island, in San Francisco Bay, while the second is at Exposition Park in Los Angeles, where it would sit near the Natural History Museum and Coliseum. The Lucas Museum will decide the final location in the next two to four months.

One proposal is for a location on Treasure Island, in San Francisco Bay. The other is in Exposition Park in Los Angeles, near the Natural History Museum and just west of the Coliseum. Both are fluid, forward-looking designs from the office of 40-year-old Chinese architect Ma Yansong, a rising star who also worked with Lucas on his ill-fated proposal for the Chicago lakefront.

Design for San Francisco :

The Los Angeles site occupies a narrow strip of land along Vermont Avenue, in a section of Exposition Park now filled by a pair of surface parking lots. (Not to worry, traffic-obsessed Angelenos: The proposal calls for a subterranean parking structure for 1,800 cars.) The museum would rise just south of Jesse Brewer Jr. Park and a light-rail stop on Metro’s Expo Line.

Both proposals feature the smooth, digitally derived forms for which Ma (who is also designing a mixed-use project on Wilshire Boulevard in Beverly Hills) is well known. Bacigalupi said it was too early to say exactly how much the museum might cost to build in either location. (Including the endowment, the total value of the project is likely to exceed $1 billion.) He also said details of a lease agreement at either spot remained to be hammered out.

Design for Los Angeles: