Sketches Released of New Star Wars Museum 65
An anonymous reader writes Chicago has some great museums, but none have architecture that excite me as much as the renderings (read "storyboards, not blueprints," but they're also called "plans," which I hope means they're pretty accurate) of George Lucas's Star Wars museum. Technically, it's the "George Lucas Museum of Narrative Art," but we know what he means, and these pictures only make the point clearer. Says the Associated Press story, "The Beijing-based principal designer, Ma Yansong of MAD Architects, released the first sketches Tuesday. The seven-story museum will be located between Soldier Field and McCormick Place on Lake Michigan. It's expected to cost about $400 million. Ma has said it's the most important project of his career to date."
Priorities (Score:2)
"most important project of his career to date."
George Lucas Museum of Narrative Art (Score:2)
George Lucas Museum of Narrative Art
I bet I'll be the only person in the "More American Graffiti" and "Willow" section.
Re:George Lucas Museum of Narrative Art (Score:4, Funny)
George Lucas Museum of Narrative Art
I bet I'll be the only person in the "More American Graffiti" and "Willow" section.
Yes, but I'll be nearby in the "Howard the Duck" wing.
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Standing next to the giant photo of Leah Thompson in her panties? I love that exhibit.
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Standing next to the giant photo of Leah Thompson in her panties? I love that exhibit.
I don't know about Leah Thompson, but you can see a minimalistically dressed Lea Thompson on TV every Monday at the moment, cavorting around with a bunch of half naked guys.
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I must have missed that one - which Back To The Future movie was that in?
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I wonder how much of the cost the people of Chicago are going to have to pony up.
[Jedi mind trick] It won't cost anything you anything. You should support it.
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Suit yourself. As a San Franciscan I'm disappointed we weren't able to keep Lucas and this Museum; it actually looks incredible and I wish we would have been able to have it.
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architecture (Score:2)
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1.8, it'll be union built in Chicago.
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I just assumed you got it from the Special Edition.
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Tapes. (Score:3)
the renderings (read "storyboards, not blueprints," but they're also called "plans,"
What about "tapes"? Though I'm surprised they're not more secret, so they won't fall into the wrong hands.
And is there any sort of contingency in case someone steals them?
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Futuristic? (Score:2)
That style of swoopy curvy blob may have looked "futuristic" back in the 50's and 60's when it first debuted... now it just looks old, tired, derivative, and lame.
Re:Futuristic? (Score:5, Funny)
That style of swoopy curvy blob may have looked "futuristic" back in the 50's and 60's when it first debuted... now it just looks old, tired, derivative, and lame.
Then it's the perfect look for the George Lucas Museum.
He sets 'em up and I bat 'em out, folks. We'll be here all week.
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They were going for a Jabba like look
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Nicely played! :)
Wrong franchise (Score:2)
Looks more like Star Trek style architecture with is curved and clean look then Star Wars style. It even had a saucer section on top.
Goddamnit (Score:3)
First that spaceship crashed into Soldier Field and now this.
If Chicago doesn't change parties, either libertarian, GOP, green, anything really, the city is never going to be relevant again. Too much corruption and stupid projects. We have terrible roads to get anywhere, awful schools, and a joke of a county hospital system.
Oh, but hey, shiny bean.
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Feel free to park at Millennium Garages, it's an easy 2 mile walk from Soldier Field. Famous of tailgating out of the wind: Underground!
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Stargoat, you are a hundred percent right, but I don't think any party but Green would change the behavior towards the positive. We just need someone who cares about the city and has some integrity. He/she could be a Democrat, but not one I've met, so far. I know, let's resurrect Harold.
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yeah tell me about all those world class red cities...
$400m!!!?! (Score:3, Insightful)
$400m dollars? I get the whole preserving your legacy thing, and it's his money he can do what he wants I guess...but is there nothing better that he could put $400m towards that will actually do the world good?
Re: $400m!!!?! (Score:1)
War Stars (Score:2)
What the US badly needs is a museum for War Stars [amazon.com].
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And this is where a rousing chorus of "hurrah's" turns into burning you at the stake.
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And this is where I'll tell you that Stanley Kubrick had one half of a great movie - the first half of Full Metal Jacket.
2001 is the most overrated movie of all time, and yes, the book is fucking shit too (and the sequels are even worse). It's got some great cinematography - great visuals and got a lot of the space scenes right. But the movie itself is a fucking bore with no payoff, regardless of how hard you try to convince yourself that there's some "meaning" to get and that you actually get it. With a
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Shit. Lost a couple words when arranging stuff.
Eyes Wide Shut is like a drug-induced fever dream where you take all the sexual tension between Maverick and Goose and use it to try and convince people that Tom Cruise is straight.
Re:Let It Fucking Go (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm sorry, I really should let it go, but...
Terminator 2 was not empty. Aliens was not completely empty. The Abyss was classic start shooting before you have a script debacle. True Lies was just plain offensive. (Those movies are fundamentally about Fatherhood, Motherhood, Marriage, and Cameron not realizing that he's a dick, respectively.)
The LotR movies, including The Hobbit, all made my ass hurt. Here's a good rule of thumb: movies should not take as long to watch as it takes to read the book.
It's the budget (which you allude to above) which is the problem. For a given film-maker, pretty much the bigger the budget, the worse the movie. Peter Jackson made Meet the Feebles, for goodness, sake. When he had to scrape by, he made amazing things. Cameron and Lucas have basically the same problem.
In your comment above you say Lucas only directed one good film. This is wrong, because you've forgotten THX 1138 and American Graffiti -- neither as good as the first star wars movie, but neither as bad as anything he did after that.
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King Kong was what it was, and it knew it. Despite being too fucking long it didn't try to outdo the original, and it didn't insult me by pretending that there was more substance to it. I consider it good and decently faithful, but certainly not great. It was an action movie with slight adventure.
LotR may be a decent adaptation, but I consider the source to be extremely overwrought and drawn out, so you're right - there's basically a built-in limit to how much I could possible like the films. Fellowship
um (Score:4, Insightful)
Living near and often visiting Chicago and it's lake front... I can attest to the fact that the absolute last thing it needs is yet another useless modern art building at the expense of Grass and trees. I have friends and family that live in Chicago, and all of their yards are spotty grass, fence, spotty grass, fence, alley, fence, spotty grass... for miles and mile and miles. They visit the lakefront parks weekly so as not to shoot themselves in the head after realizing that they indeed moved to a dystopian urban nightmare with a higher murder rate than Afghanistan.
One more building with nothing interesting in it will do no-one any good.
No, it's not Mies van der Rohe (Score:5, Interesting)
That's not anything like a Mies van der Rohe building. Rohe was a form-follows-function glass box architect. He did some of the best glass boxes of the 20th century, notably the IIT campus in Chicago. His work is very rectangular.
Wright did more unusual forms. In his later years, he designed the Marin Civic Center [google.com] which Lucas, being from Marin, would have seen. It's been called the Martian Embassy. It's so alien it's been used in several science fiction movies. Like most Wright buildings, it's nicely integrated with the terrain.
Here's the park that must be destroyed to build to satisify Lucas' ego. [goo.gl]
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you mean this parking lot, bro?
https://www.google.com/maps/@4... [google.com]
i think there is a TON of misinformation here from butt-hurt sanfran residents.
How many bothan spies is it going to take (Score:2)
To finish this ?
Spoliers (Score:1)
Jabba's palace (Score:3)
From TFA:
Does that mean Chicago is a wretched hive of scum and villainy?
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It is that but the mayor that looked like Jabba OD'd on fast food and croaked in 1987. The little shit in power now just looks like an emaciated racoon who raids garbage cans
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Oh, I didn't realize it was Rahm knocking over my trash every night. Now that I know, I will put out some capsaicin treats for the cute little critter.
Seven stories? (Score:3)
Damn them.
This completely violates our historical treatment of the lakefront for the past 100 years and has been specifically forbidden since the 70's. They are putting it right between the only other two structures which do the same thing. We've had two mayors in a row who do not understand the lakefront and it's role in Chicago, or who just don't give a crap. Daniel Burnham would have reamed them a new one. If they want 7 stories, they're welcome to it, but only if they dig 5 stories down.
Furthermore, this placement of a major draw right between two other major draws is a great idea, because transit to the other two venues already doesn't work. Let's make it worse. Brilliant. They currently have one train which stops right nearby which isn't connected to the rest of the transit system, and another train which is connected but which doesn't come close enough for most people to consider taking it. There's parking all around and it all exits into a small area of road, so that traffic gets to be a nightmare around these two venues.
Yeah, let's add another. And let's make it so tall it blots out the lake.
Bastards.
Hopefully friends of the park will sue them into submission. Put this damn thing on the other side of the drive. It's so tall it won't matter where you put it anyway. Hell, it's so big you could run I55 right through it.
Also releasing new playset (Score:1)
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I use them, as do my friends.
That's no mooseum (Score:2)
I got a bad feeling about this.
Scrap it, Go McQuarrie (Score:2)
The Aldera [wikia.com] design is even in the same color scheme, except it doesn't suck as architecture (implemented McQuarrie designs tend to lose the That 70's Look of his paint). Here's the deal - windows make for free light for a whole bunch of exhibits (put the dark ones in the center), normal humans enjoy bright and sunny places, and they also enjoy non-creepy architecture as well.
The proposed design looks like the Taelon embassy tried to assimilate a circus tent, and - what is that, a golden halo on top of the L
Yawn... (Score:2)
There is more to this museum than Star Wars, (Score:2)
Here is a sampling:
Lucas Museum of Narrative Art [lucasmuseum.org], 17 Works of Art That Will Hang In George Lucas's New Museum [gizmodo.com]
''Vanity projects'' are nothing new in America, where the arts are driven primarily by private, not public, funds. Old-school, philanthropic museums were themselves public monuments to their founders' savvy. They were also, a tastemaking project by nouveau riche American tycoons: When the Industrial Revolution triggered fears that the growing immigrant workforce would prevent America from developing a highbrow culture like Europe's, the wealthy fought the perceived onslaught by funding institutes filled with old-world classics to educate the people's taste, to help them identify with the values of the successful industrialists.
Today's benefactors buy and preserve what they consider purely American art. Private collectors in the past few decades have been stealthily accumulating valuable holdings in order to tell their versions of the country's art history. Each in their own way are making a bid to define what art is in America and what it has been in the 150 years.
There's a fittingly egalitarian spirit to this latest wave of museum openings. The Rubell Family Collection opened shop in Miami's rundown Wynwood neighborhood to display the kind of avant-garde works usually found in high-end art galleries. Perhaps even more daring is Crystal Bridges, Walmart heiress Alice Walton's passion project that brought Lichtenstein and Warhol to a small town in the Ozarks. Costing a reported $1.2 billion to open in 2011, Crystal Bridges doesn't charge for admission, a fact that conveys the belief that art, like music and literature, is not a recreational luxury or the purview of the rich. Rather, it is an essential tool that helps awaken and direct talent whose development is essential to society, especially a democratic one.
George Lucas's Art Museum: His Best Idea Since Star Wars [theatlantic.com]