2026 is a big year for MAD Architects. So far, the Beijing-headquartered firm has completed an airport, a science museum, a design museum, and a major corporate headquarters, all in China. On Sept. 22, the firm, led by Ma Yansong, will open its first public project in the U.S.—and it’s a doozy. The $1 billion, 11-acre campus of the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art in Los Angeles’s Exposition Park houses the Star Wars archives and art collection assembled by director George Lucas and his wife, executive Mellody Hobson.
Not unlike the original Star Wars trilogy, the journey to realize this museum was dramatic and arduous. In 2013, the couple had their sights on San Francisco’s Presidio as the future location for the Lucas Cultural Arts Museum with another architecture firm attached. When the Presidio Trust scuppered those plans, they turned their attention to a lakefront property in Chicago’s Soldier Field (Hobson’s hometown). The next year, they held an international competition, and at only 38, Ma was a surprise choice, besting firms with larger profiles. At the time, Lucas told Vanity Fair he wanted “an iconic building like the Sydney Opera House.” He found a kindred spirit in Ma, whose awe-inspiring, fluid, organic forms matched his cinematic vision of space. Lucas also replaced “Cultural Arts” with “Narrative Arts” to center visual storytelling.
After a protracted legal battle with the neighborhood advocacy group that opposed the privately funded museum, the team abandoned the Windy City and found a new and final home in Los Angeles in 2017. Ma stayed the course, shifting Chicago’s dune-inspired form (critics compared it to a “science fair volcano” or “giant lump”) to an elongated, amoeba-shaped cloud structure stretching more than two football fields in length.
The Lucas Museum opening is a full circle moment for the architect, who trained in the U.S. at the Yale School of Architecture 25 years ago. After a short stint at Zaha Hadid Architects in London, he returned to China to establish his own studio in 2004.
Since winning the competition to design the Ordos Museum in Inner Mongolia in 2005, Ma has been riding the wave of a booming economy eager to compete with the West. “As a young architect, I got a lot of chances,” he tells CULTURED. “I treat each project as an opportunity to change and to challenge.” Completed in 2011, the Ordos Museum put Ma on the map (Lucas was an early fan). The futuristic tortoise-like shell, inspired by Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic domes, was a prescient signal of how the architect was willing to upend the dominance of the boxy uniform buildings in China’s rampant urbanism.
Upon entering the building, guests are confronted with a canyon-like atrium, and the circulation along the sky bridges that criss-cross the cavernous space is as exciting as the gallery spaces that feature Mongolian history and art. In 2015, Ma leaned into biomorphic shapes even further with the Harbin Grand Opera House, a sinuous set of forms emerging from the landscape like a reptilian creature. The heart of the building is the auditorium clad in honey-colored ash, a cocoon reminiscent of a beehive, full of activity and warmth.
As his practice became more robust, Ma published his first book, Shanshui City, in 2014. This manifesto concretized his view that architecture in China could move beyond appropriating the West’s obsession of Modernism and instead honor and integrate the “mountains and waters” of traditional Shanshui ink paintings. Ma considers the natural environment the key to unlocking a contemporary urbanism that centers human emotion and connection. These ideas found form in Chaoyang Park Plaza from 2017, a 10-building complex centered on two obsidian-black glass towers whose profiles mimic dramatic, water-eroded mountain shapes, commonly depicted in the inky drawings of Shanshui art.
“We can relate to architecture as a landscape, as nature’s forms, and organic shapes,” Ma tells me. “Later, I realized it’s more about experience or emotions and less about forms.” And while it’s certainly apt to refer to Ma’s work as futuristic and nonconforming, he spends his design time focused on the visitor’s trek—and in the case of the Lucas Museum, lifting up the structure like a tree canopy, providing an underbelly of gardens, reconnecting us to nature and contemplation.
As Ma approaches a career-defining moment in LA, he is also making history as only the second Chinese-born architect to helm a major U.S. museum. (The first was I.M. Pei, who designed the East Building of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, in 1978.) Like Pei, whose sharp angles and light-flooded atria sometimes drew skeptics before ultimately winning them over, Ma recognizes the Lucas Museum already has its detractors. (One camp’s prevailing sentiment is that the anonymous futuristic vessel is so self-contained it ignores local context.)
As he awaits the onslaught of opinions once the museum has opened, Ma is buoyed by the recent response to Shenzhen Bay Culture Square, which was fully completed this summer. In the set of boulder-shaped buildings, the majority of galleries are subterranean, allowing for a rooftop to match a ground-level plane, creating a massive park for the public. Ma thought the unusual design might take years for the locals to accept, but the reaction was swift—and glowing. “Sometimes the controversy is not about a new look but if people feel comfortable,” Ma says. “Are they looking for new energy? And if they feel the energy, they will show they like it. Shenzhen was prepared for new things, and I think LA is the same.”
Ahead of the Lucas Museum’s opening, Ma answered a rapid-fire questionnaire about his architectural predilections.
What was your favorite toy growing up?
A light blue Beetle toy car.
Whose house would you live in (real or fictional), and why?
I would like to try Fallingwater by Frank Lloyd Wright, because I don’t have a problem sleeping with noise.
What is your go-to uniform when you’re powering through a project?
Shorts.
Who chooses the playlist in your studio?
I keep talking in the studio, so there’s no music playing unless people are listening through their earphones.
What’s a trend in architecture you wish would die out?
Post-Modern.
What is one detail of a structure that most people wouldn’t notice, but that you always look to for insight?
How clean a ceiling can be.
Are there any analog materials you return to in spite of the prevalence of new technologies?
Wood and paper.
What is the most progressive architectural city you’ve visited?
Paris.
What is the last source of inspiration that surprised you?
Deserts and rocks.
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