In making room for the Lucas Museum, Exposition Park reprises a familiar L.A. role
“The erosion of Exposition Park’s public open space continues.” So wrote urban planner Alan Loomis nearly 15 years ago, in an essay published by the Los Angeles Forum for Architecture and Urban Design.
That was before the Natural History Museum, born as the county museum and long the park’s anchor cultural tenant, ditched one expansion plan and built another; before the architecture firm Morphosis added an elementary school, wrapped in its signature slashing forms, near the northeast corner of the park; before USC took formal control of the Coliseum, with plans to modernize it; before the space shuttle Endeavour arrived at the California Science Center, with a new glass pavilion planned to house it; and before Welton Becket’s Sports Arena was demolished to make way for a soccer stadium.
With the news Tuesday that George Lucas will be building a billion-dollar museum of “narrative art” just west of the Coliseum, choosing that site over a competing one on Treasure Island in San Francisco Bay, the balance in Exposition Park has tipped once more from open space toward architecture, from protecting to building. The museum — a long, white, aerodynamic form that will seem to float above the surface of the park — will be designed by young Chinese architect Ma Yansong and is expected to open in 2021.
You could argue, in other words, that a lot has changed in Exposition Park in a generation or that nothing has. Even as more trophy buildings and cultural attractions are squeezed inside its 160 acres, connected by the Expo Line to the regional rail network, it retains its traditional usefulness for the city in both political and emblematic terms.
It is a wellspring Los Angeles mayors can always dip into when making their most ambitious civic pitches. (Let’s get one of those retired space shuttles for our very own! And the NFL — again! And a third Olympics!) It is also a stage where the region’s oldest morality play, the one casting Southern California as a paradise lost, a region whose beauty and natural resources are perennially threatened by overzealous development, is mounted, like the “Ramona” pageant, again and again.
What Exposition Park isn’t, in either case, is a carefully guarded open space,…