It’s not quite Brexit. But on Friday George Lucas announced that he had abandoned plans to build his Lucas Museum of Narrative Art in Chicago. Now the museum’s director, Don Bacigalupi, says the Star Wars filmmaker is “engaged in due diligence on sites in San Francisco and Los Angeles.”
The decision to leave Chicago had been expected for weeks. Lucas had hoped to build on a parking lot near Soldier Field, and in 2014 he released renderings of a mushroom-like building by Ma Yansong of Los Angeles- and Beijing-based MAD Architects (best known for a pair of sinuous condo towers near Toronto). The structure was 400,000 square feet (if “square feet” can be applied to a building with seemingly no right angles). But in late 2014 a group called Friends of the Parks filed suit, claiming the city had no right to convey waterfront land, held in a public trust, to the museum.
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