Architect Tries Luring Lucas Museum Back To Chicago With New Site
By Gwendolyn Purdom in News on Jul 7, 2016 9:30PM
Design for the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art
Some people just won’t take no for an answer.
New York architect Michael Sorkin penned a passionate letter to George Lucas and Mellody Hobson recently, Curbed Chicago reports, urging the filmmaker and his wife to reconsider Chicago as the site of their forthcoming museum after officially announcing the city was out as a contender last month. The letter suggests the museum be built on the sprawling U.S. Steel site on the far South Side (which was once floated as a potential site for the Obama Library, as well) instead of the spot it had been slated for near Soldier Field that had the Friends of the Parks so worked up.
“By building your project on this waiting site in South Chicago,” the letter says, “you will dramatically assert this principle of inclusion in the strongest terms and offer this neglected part of the city tremendous dignity and the opportunity to create its own narratives. And, such a move can catalyze a true people’s campus and park, a complex of sympathetic and galvanizing landscapes and institutions that will create authentic pride of place for so many who feel they’ve simply been left out.”
Among his five bulleted arguments in the letter for why Lucas and Hobson should give Chicago another shot, Sorkin contends the U.S. Site would allow for the museum to actually increase city park space (a proposition that did little to dissuade the Friends of the Park from their crusade when Mayor Emanuel tried the tactic in June), boost the economy on the South Side, and perhaps help unite the famously segregated North and South sides. Sorkin covers a number of ways the museum team could work with the city to make this happen—a ferry system that would transport tourists from Navy Pier to Museum Campus to the South Shore Cultural Center to the new Lucas Museum, for instance—as well.
Of course, Sorkin also adds his firm would be more than happy to assist in the creation of this new museum iteration and offered up some renderings of his firm’s vision for the 600 acre plot.
May the Force be with you, Mr. Sorkin.
Read the whole letter here.