The visionary multimillionaire movie mogul George Lucas has announced that the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art will finally be going up in the city of Los Angeles – in Exposition Park, near the Natural History Museum and Coliseum. This news puts an end to a long process of searching for proposals and locations that began in the year 2013 with a project of classicist airs in San Francisco, continued with a large complex in Chicago that Chicagoans eventually rejected, and returned west to California, with Los Angeles ultimately carrying the day over San Francisco for various reasons, perhaps most importantly its being home to the the mecca of movies.

The purpose of the new museum is to house and exhibit items that Lucas has collected in the course of his life – more than 10,000 paintings, books, and magazines, including first editions of works by the likes of the painter-illustrator Norman Rockwell and the cartoonist Robert Crumb – and the principal focus will be cinema, with special attention given to original art material and memorabilia of the mythical films of Lucas, particularly the Star Wars saga, whose sequels, prequels, and interquels continue being box-office hits all over the world. It is no coincidence that to give shape to this container of galactic treats, Lucas has selected the ever spectacular Chinese architect Ma Yansong (MAD), who has designed for him an enormous object posed on an immaculate green meadow, with aerodynamic forms evoking the aesthetic of the white spacecraft that are part of our imagery of cinema and pop culture. This cruise liner of sorts will cost a billion dollars.