When “Star Wars” creator George Lucas unveils plans this fall for a Chicago museum, the building’s chief architect, China’s Ma Yansong, will face some of the most intense scrutiny of his fledgling career.

Ma is 39, a relatively young age in a profession dominated by the 50-and-older crowd. He already has made an international reputation with boldly sculpted buildings like the curvaceous “Marilyn Monroe” residential towers outside Toronto and a pod-shaped museum in the Chinese city of Ordos. He is widely considered one of China’s rising architectural stars.

“He is such a big personality — such amazing self-confidence,” Shanghai-based Clare Jacobson, author of “New Museums in China,” wrote in an email.But it is one thing to design a museum for the relatively blank slate of a new town, as Ma has done in China, and quite another to insert such a building into the fiercely contested ground of Chicago’s lakefront. The open-space advocacy group Friends of the Parks has threatened to fight Lucas’ plans in court. It contends that the museum, no matter what its design, would violate a city law protecting the shoreline’s openness....Continue Reading

> via chicagotribune.com