The Lucas Museum Put the Parking Underground

Before construction began, Exposition Park met Vermont Avenue with the least persuasive possible version of public land: gated asphalt. On Tuesday, September 22, the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art opens on that western edge with a five-story white building, gardens, meadows, paths and more than 300 new trees. The museum looks ready to levitate. The larger change happened underneath it.

Designed by Ma Yansong of MAD with Stantec, the 300,000-square-foot building is roughly 700 feet long. Its sides swell outward above narrow supports, leaving a shaded plaza beneath a central arch that spans 185 feet. This is the part destined for aerial photographs and spaceship comparisons. It is strange, expensive and almost aggressively recognizable in a city where major cultural buildings often act embarrassed about being major cultural buildings.

The more useful view is at ground level. Mia Lehrer and Studio-MLA turned the former parking lots into a contoured landscape with an amphitheater, hanging garden, outdoor sculptures, drought-tolerant planting and routes connecting the neighborhood to the rest of Exposition Park. The gardens are free to enter without a museum ticket. Adult admission to the galleries costs $25, so that distinction matters.

The old parking did not simply vanish. Cars moved into underground structures beneath the museum grounds, making much of the new landscape an enormous green roof. To form hills without loading the garage below with impossible amounts of soil, the design team used thousands of lightweight foam blocks, then layered soil and planting above them. What looks like topography is also structural arithmetic: enough depth for living plants, enough variation to feel like a park and little enough weight to remain safely overhead.

That engineered ground now performs jobs the asphalt could not. Rain that previously drained toward the sewer can be captured for irrigation. Trees and planted slopes introduce shade along an edge of the park that had offered very little. Four east-west paths make the campus more porous, while the museum’s lifted center lets people pass beneath the building instead of walking around a solid institutional wall. The architecture earns some of its drama by making room below itself.

Cars remain fundamental to the arrangement. Exposition Park hosts museums, USC football, professional soccer and major events, and its institutions have spent decades treating parking supply as untouchable. The Lucas project accepts that political reality and pays heavily to stack another landscape above it. This is not a model of car-free planning. The achievement is simpler and still valuable: automobiles no longer own the visible surface.

The landscape also belongs in the accounting of the museum’s unusually generous land deal. California granted the privately financed institution a 99-year lease with annual rent of $30. In exchange, the museum agreed to build and maintain public park space and fund nearby improvements, including work at Jesse Brewer Jr. Park and a replacement sports field. Pending contractor lawsuits now dispute how cleanly a billion-dollar project on public land can be classified as private. Whatever courts decide, the nominal rent makes the quality and durability of the public benefits more than a pleasant bonus.

Free access does not automatically settle that question. These remain museum grounds, managed by an institution with gates, operating hours and control over how spaces are used. The rooftop landscape is also less publicly accessible than its flowing form suggests. A civic-looking garden can become a decorative forecourt if everyday visitors feel they are merely passing through someone else’s campus.

Still, Exposition Park has gained something Los Angeles regularly fails to extract from large projects: useful ground. The Lucas Museum could have been a spectacular object surrounded by service drives and leftover planting. Instead, it buried the logistical problem that once dominated the site and gave the surface to paths, trees and people. The white shell will keep getting compared to a spaceship. The better test will be much less cinematic: whether Angelenos keep treating the land beneath it as their park.