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What George Lucas Built
Charlie Cichetti
September 20, 2026
Smart strategies. Sharp stories. Sustainability that sticks.
📬 INTRO: SIXTEEN YEAR AND A PARKING LOT
George Lucas spent 16 years and three cities trying to build this museum. San Francisco fell through. So did Chicago. More than 16 years after first proposing it, the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art opens Sept. 22 in Los Angeles, paid for with around $1 billion of his own money.
“This one almost broke my will,” Lucas told CNN.
The building sits on what used to be an asphalt parking lot, and it cools itself with the ground underneath. Here’s a rundown on what he built!
🌍 FIELD NOTES: BUILT LIKE A BLOCKBUSTER
🛸 No Straight Lines
Ma Yansong of MAD Architects designed the five-story, 300,000-square-foot building with Stantec. LERA handled structure and Hathaway Dinwiddie built it. The shell is more than 1,200 fiberglass-reinforced polymer panels, each shaped and placed individually with a mix of robotics and handwork. A central steel arch spans 185 feet over a shaded public plaza. About 6,400 construction workers built it, more than half from LA County.
The whole building rides on 281 base isolators, steel balls in 6-foot bowls that let it shift up to 42 inches in an earthquake.
🕳️ 700 Holes Under the Lawn
The museum sits on 714 geothermal wells, each 365 feet deep, tied to a waterfall fountain that helps shed heat. The ground does the cooling work a conventional cooling tower would do, on less energy and water.
About 24,000 square feet of solar panels cover roughly 15% of the curved roof. The rest is planted.
About 113 miles of pipe carry the museum’s heat into the ground.
🌳 Parking Lot to Park
Studio-MLA (Mia Lehrer) and Stantec shaped the landscape after California foothills, valleys, mesas, and canyons. The 13-acre campus adds more than 300 trees (jacarandas, oaks, and pines) with drought-tolerant planting picked to save water and cut heat.
General admission runs $25. The park, the research library, and admission for residents of the museum’s own ZIP code are all free.
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🏛 BUILT TO LAST:
Lucas put 700-plus wells under a new park. Size the well field to the load, and plan it with the landscape at concept, since both need the same open ground.
By role:
📐 Designers: MAD’s 1,200-plus custom panels came off robotic fabrication. Freeform shells are buildable now.
🔨 Builders: Get a geothermal driller’s schedule in hand before you bid.
🏢 Operators: A ground loop means no cooling tower water to treat or top off.
🌱 Emerging pros: Learn ground loop design. DOE is paying to train installers in eight regions.
💬 QUOTE OF THE WEEK
“The most photographed building in Los Angeles this fall does its cooling 365 feet underground. Performance and beauty can share a budget.”
— Charlie Cichetti, CEO of Skema and LEED Fellow
🧠 TL;DR
The Lucas Museum opens Sept. 22 on a former LA parking lot, cooled by more than 700 geothermal wells under a solar and planted roof. Ferry terminals and campuses are drilling too.
🧱RETROFIT THIS
🔧TOOLS DOWN:
Sixteen years ago, George pitched a museum.
San Francisco fell through. So did Chicago.
Los Angeles offered a parking lot.
Crews drilled 700-plus holes under it.
Sixteen years later, the old parking lot cools the museum.
May the ground loop be with you!
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✍️ Brian Bollinger, our Head Writer, helps sustainability professionals connect performance, workflow, and real-world results.
🌍️ Charlie Cichetti, our Fearless Leader is the CEO of Skema and a LEED Fellow. He has guided more than 150,000 professionals as building practice continues to evolve.
Let’s Green Up together.
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