George Lucas Designs New USC Film School Building

From the New York Times:

Mr. Lucas, an architectural hobbyist, laid out the original designs for the project and donated an initial $175 million to build and support it. Industry benefactors like Warner Brothers, Fox and the Walt Disney Company have contributed another $50 million....

In effect Mr. Lucas is rebuilding the university’s film school for the second time. Having attended in the 1960s, when the school turned out fellow filmmakers like Randal Kleiser (“Grease”) and John Milius (“Big Wednesday”), Mr. Lucas later provided funds for, among other things, a George Lucas Instructional Building that served as the film school’s administrative center before being closed this year.

“I used to call that building the ‘San Fernando Valley S&L,’ ” Mr. Lucas said on Friday. Neither he nor school administrators ever quite warmed to an exterior design that featured odd angles and high, arched windows, never mind an interior with warrenlike offices.

This time around Mr. Lucas took things in his own hands. A little more than three years ago he presented the school’s dean, Elizabeth M. Daley, who had gone north on a routine visit, with a set of detailed architectural sketches of what he intended to create on the venerable campus southwest of downtown Los Angeles.

SciArc can't be happy. Day by day, Starchitects are losing their influence.

The school's presentation of the buildings is here.