Lucas is hoping that the third or the fourth time will be the charm. He’s decided to bundle those efforts together, simultaneously unveiling two different museum designs this week for a pair of California sites.

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. ... 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.

The double release of the conceptual designs is just the latest twist in a campaign that has been unorthodox, even scattershot, from the start. When Lucas first went public with plans for a San Francisco museum to hold his collection, which is heavy on Norman Rockwell and Hollywood artifacts and largely disdains modernism, minimalism and abstraction, neither Bacigalupi nor Ma was part of his team. ... If any of Ma’s sculptural, dramatically abstract proposals for the museum — and there have now been three of them, for Los Angeles, Treasure Island and Chicago — were a work of art, there is little chance Lucas would be interested in adding it to his collection. In my experience, when the architecture of a proposed museum is noticeably out of step with the collection it is meant to hold, it’s usually a sign of larger, hidden power struggles or a tangled sense of mission. Or both.

Some of Lucas’ supporters have made the case that the museum’s futuristic gleam is reminiscent of the inventive look of the early “Star Wars” movies. But that seems a stretch, a desire to see a link between Lucas’ youthful Hollywood work and his current architectural thinking that may not actually be there.

Ma Yansong's Exposition Park design for the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art would have parkland at its feet.
Ma Yansong's Exposition Park design for the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art would have parkland at its feet. - 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.Forming a kind of gateway facing 39th Street along the western edge of the park, the building would hold between 265,000 and 275,000 square feet of interior space, with about 100,000 square feet earmarked for galleries. The dimensions of the Treasure Island museum are the same. ... Ma’s design sets aside a significant amount of shaded landscaping under the museum building, where parked cars now sit, allowing Bacigalupi to argue that rather than removing green space from Exposition Park, they would in fact be adding some. And unlike Zumthor’s building for LACMA, Ma’s Exposition Park proposal is topped by thickly planted and publicly accessible terraces.Still, the proposal would squeeze a very large new building into a park already crowded with attractions. © Lucas Museum of Narrative Art
Lucas' Treasure Island plan, for the middle of San Francisco Bay.
Lucas' Treasure Island plan, for the middle of San Francisco Bay. - On Treasure Island, the museum would be part of a new master-planned district facing the San Francisco skyline and near a proposed ferry terminal. (Virtually all visitors now reach the island via the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge.) The site offers dramatic views of the Bay but is buffeted by strong winds; in response, Ma’s design has less outdoor space and significantly larger bands of windows than the L.A. version. © Lucas Museum of Narrative Art