We found out this week that Giroux Glass will soon be a part of an exciting addition to the Los Angeles cultural scene: the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art. Right in the back yard of our downtown headquarters location, the new museum will be at Exposition Park, at the University of Southern California.
Founded by philanthropist and filmmaker George Lucas and his wife, business woman, Mellody Hobson, the new museum will exhibit a permanent collection and rotate paintings, photography, illustration, cinematic art and digital art from Lucas’s personal collection, and will also include a Star Wars exhibit. Educational programming will provide interesting ways for visitors to interact with narrative art.
The general contractor on this project is Hathaway Dinwiddie, with whom we recently worked on the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum renovations, next door to the museum. The architect of the $1 billion Lucas Museum project is Stantec, whose vision for the 300,000 square foot center includes five levels, a height of 115 ft. and includes a library, retail shops, offices and two theaters. The focal point of the interior space will be a circular glass elevator, enveloped in back painted glass. The project includes redeveloping the surrounding museum landscape in Exposition Park, a redesign of 11 acres of park space landscape with museum terraces.
John Cox, Giroux Glass project executive, worked on this winning bid for the past year, and describes how the company has been working on the project for some time. He reminisces, “We first heard about its possibility in 2016, followed its progress and hoped to provide glazing work from the start. Given our proximity to the project, we recognize that our convenient location will be an added benefit for our workers and as a storage and staging site – a considerable advantage given the congested street and student traffic of the project area, where other workers will need to park a distance away and be shuttled to the site.”
Construction has already begun at the site. We’re thrilled to provide our top-quality glazing and expertise to the scope which has been so far assigned to us. At this early stage, our work will entail interior glazing that includes the break area for museum office employees, the board room, the café, the East and West galleries, a retail shop and the vestibule opening. We will keep you posted as the job progresses, and are grateful to be involved with this enhancement to our neighborhood and to the city.