The façade of “Star Wars” filmmaker George Lucas’ billion-dollar Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, which officially opened Tuesday as one of the year’s biggest events in Los Angeles, was manufactured at Vallejo’s Mare Island.
It’s unlikely the star-studded group attending the museum’s gala Saturday, including Tom Cruise, Leonardo DiCaprio and Harrison Ford, had any idea of the building’s Bay Area connections – other than the fact that it houses the art collection of Lucas and his wife Mellody Hobson.
The building’s façade is composed of 1,500 panels, all prefabricated by Kreysler & Associates of American Canyon at its Mare Island production facility. The prestigious Façade Techtonics Institute described it as “one of the most innovative and geometrically complex enclosures currently under construction in North America” in 2023.
The panels adorn a structure that is five stories high, white and with a shape that can only be described as bulbous. The 300,000-square-foot museum was designed to look like a spaceship and was 17 years in the making.
The building is surrounded by over 10 acres of green. Those who stroll the grounds can share in a high-drama feminist moment via a sculpture memorializing Carrie Fisher’s Princess Leia in her metal bikini choking Jabba the Hutt to death, a scene from 1983’s “Return of the Jedi.”
Of course, there’s all kinds of other artwork on display in the five-story museum’s interior, including works by Banksy and, in what some might describe as a visual oxymoron, Norman Rockwell.
And those who view the exterior, which, of course, a visitor can’t help but do, can reflect on the fact that sometimes, beauty really is skin-deep — in the case of the museum’s façade, anyway.
Architect Ma Yansong of MAD Architects designed the building with a continuous curved surface across five stories. There are no right angles. Each of the panels, which measure around five or six feet wide and as long as 30 feet, occupies a unique position in the geometry.
Each panel was uniquely shaped and manufactured through a process that combines milling, robotic scanning, and hand-finishing. The completed panels were shipped to Los Angeles and installed.
Henry Ford, often called the father of the assembly line, would probably be impressed by the setup at Kreysler’s Mare Island facility.
Machines cut a foam mold for each panel; resin was injected into each mold and allowed to harden; robotic arms scanned, trimmed, and finished each piece.
You might think creating a façade for a building with no right angles located 385 miles away was enough of a challenge. But no. The building sits on 281 seismic base isolators, each a steel bowl with a ball bearing designed to let the structure move from side to side during an earthquake.
Conventional panels would have added too much weight to the building, impacting the isolation system’s ability to move quickly. So the designers switched to glass fiber-reinforced plastic, which is lighter.
Among other projects, Kreysler also created the façade for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the oculus for the Broad Museum in downtown Los Angeles.
Tim Oliver, president of project development for Kreysler, said he and his company were “thrilled” to have contributed to the building.
“We were unable to make it down for the opening – we’re a little caught up in our current work,” Oliver said. He said he “absolutely” intends to visit the museum as soon as he can.
“Kreysler & Associates is extremely proud of the role we played in the realization of this remarkable building,” said William Kreysler, the firm’s president.