As the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art continues towards completion for the scheduled opening in 2026, the LA Times takes at look at the gardens and landscaping that will tell their own story, and be open to everyone, even those without a museum ticket.
The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, rising on what used to be a parking lot in Exposition Park in downtown L.A., is devoted to visual storytelling: the comics of Charles M. Schulz (“Peanuts”) and Alex Raymond (“Flash Gordon”), movie concept art by Neal Adams (“Batman”) and Ralph McQuarrie (“Star Wars”), paintings by Frida Kahlo and Jacob Lawrence, photography by Gordon Parks and Dorothea Lange, illustrations by Norman Rockwell and N.C. Wyeth.
So when George Lucas and wife Mellody Hobson chose Mia Lehrer and her L.A. firm, Studio-MLA, to design the 11 acres of landscape around — and on top of — MAD Architects’ swirling, otherworldly, billion-dollar building, the driving forces behind the Lucas Museum made it clear that the landscape had to tell a story too.
Lehrer and her team studied how directors, illustrators and painters use topography to help amplify, among other things, emotion, sequence and storyline.
“We looked at the landscapes of myths and movies,” said Kush Parekh, a principal at Studio-MLA. “How do you take someone on a journey through space? How does the terrain change the story — and how can it be the story?”
The result — which feels surprisingly grown-in even though the museum won’t open until next year — is a sinuous, eclectic landscape that unfolds in discrete vignettes, all promoting exploration and distinct experience. Each zone contains varied textures, colors, scales and often framed views. A shaded walkway curls along a meandering meadow and lifts you toward a hilly canyon. A footbridge carries you above a developing conifer thicket. A plant-covered trellis, known as “the hanging garden,” provides a more compressed moment of pause. The environment, like a good story, continually shifts tone and tempo.
Photo: The grounds include the terraced seating of an amphitheater. (Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)
“It’s episodic,” Parekh said. “Each biome reveals something new, each path hints at what’s ahead without giving it away.”
A key theme of the story is the diverse terrain of California — a place that, in Lehrer’s words, “contains more varied environments in a single day’s drive than most countries do in a week.” Foothills and valleys, groves and canyons, even the mesas, plateaus and plains of the Sierra and the Central Valley — Lehrer calls all of it a “choreography of place.”
Another, more subtle, layer of this narrative is time. Plantings were laid out to bloom in different seasons and in different places. Bright yellow “Safari Goldstrike” leucadendron, edging the meadow and canyon, come alive in late winter and early spring. Tall jacarandas, spied from a foothills overlook, emerge then quickly disappear. “Bee’s Bliss” sage, lying low in the oak woodland, turn lavender blue in the early summer. Something is always emerging, something else fading.
“Every month, every visit, feels different,” Parekh said.
Even the alpine-inspired plantings cladding the museum’s roof — colorful wildflowers, long sweeping grasses and coarse scrubs, all chosen for their hardiness, lightness and shallow roots — follow this rhythm.
“They’re alive. They change. They move with the climate,” Lehrer said.
Read the article in full here. Find out more about the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art at the official website here.
Main Image: Myung J. Chun/Los Angeles Times
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