It came as little surprise that George Lucas and other backers then chose a lakefront site for his proposed Lucas Museum of Narrative Art. Yet in 2016 their proposal prompted fierce opposition and a lawsuit from a local nonprofit group, Friends of the Parks, that eventually sent the museum all the way to California in search of a home.

Less than two months later, the desired location for the Obama Presidential Library was announced – in lakefront Jackson Park. Friends of the Parks won’t be filing a lawsuit against this proposal – but they are once again opposed. Times have changed. ... For all of the dubious attention attracted by the “Bilbao Effect” theory – the idea that an iconic cultural structure can rechart a city’s fortunes and public image, as with as Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim – a more prosaic, and arguably more important aspect of museum location has received little attention: not which city a museum is built in, but where in that city. Locations that would once have seemed inevitable, such as Chicago parkland, are hugely contentious in the 2000s, while locations previously unthinkable in that year – an abandoned lumbermill in Bilbao, or, say, a disused warehouse on the Thames – are now commonplace.

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Museums, and their locations, have changed much in the last century. There has been a turn away from bucolic sites and mock temples. Museums built in the mid-20th century were as likely to turn up in busy town centres, like the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney in Manhattan, or the Museum of London’s brick-stove-like Barbican location. The notion of a “cultural campus” became a deliberate strategy, animated by the idea that the most logical neighbours of cultural facilities were similarly minded. These grew in Berlin’s Kultuforum, in Fort Worth, in Houston, and countless other locations.

The nature of the museum’s role began to change. G Stanley Hall, a turn-of-the-century psychologist, wrote about American museums in the age of Chicago’s lakefront boom, characterising them as “an esoteric and aesthetic mausoleum of pictures, open on certain days of the week to a few people”. In the age of the rising blockbuster exhibit and substantial efforts to increase ticket sales, museums were recast as mainstream tourist attractions brimming with auditoriums and event spaces, rather than destinations for occasional jaunts for the elite.

Such shifts had a real impact on museum architecture in the burgeoning days of the “starchitect”. The starchitect’s favourite creation was surely the museum, rising out of so many locations in the 80s and 90s. As one eminent among their number, Michael Graves, commented at the Architectural League of New York in 1986: “I think this is a moment in history where we have to realise we’re not just building Kunsthalles or picture galleries. We’re building institutions that have places for discussion, places for study, and a social climate as well as a climate in which to see painting and sculpture.”

The museum as a multimedia complex became commonplace, with theatres, shops, public spaces, obligatory.

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The concept of the museum as a standalone destination, magnetic enough to overcome any difficulty in access or absence of nearby attraction, has not quite faded: the Lucas Museum may end up somewhere dramatically remote – an island in San Francisco Bay has been mentioned. Yet imperatives of both city planners and curators have been inclining towards urban convenience, and towards similar neighbours in easily accessible locations, which might well be convenient industrial brownfields or refurbished buildings, high streets, historic lakefronts, or active downtowns.

At the same time, in the choppy wake of Bilbaomania a museum cannot always rely on subservient authorities to steamroll opposition: the Obama Library has been more fortunate than the Lucas Museum but the mixed receptions to both have made clear that a new museum will not always be received as a gift-wrapped treasure.