Architecture, desires and dreams on the streets of Los Angeles
In futuristic museums, diva pools and newly reopened historic cafés flows the energy of a place in eternal renewal
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One can already admire in its spherical, somewhat spatial silhouette the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, the new architectural icon of a Los Angeles that is increasingly changing its skin. From the somewhat tarnished Mecca of cinema to the cradle of culture on the West Coast of the United States, the City of Angels spreads its wings a little higher. In early 2026, this futuristic space will be officially inaugurated: director George Lucas, godfather of Indiana Jones and Star Wars, and his partner, entrepreneur Mellody Hobson, have entrusted it to the flair of architect Ma Yansong of MAD studio. Thus, a new star will shine in Los Angeles' Exposition Park, where the California Science Center, the California African American Museum and the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County are already located, as well as the fragrant Rose Garden.
Attractions not to be missed
This sui generis exhibition centre will house Lucas's complete film archive, together with his private collection, very heterogeneous in artistic genres, which the director put together when he was little more than a student: works by illustrators such as Norman Rockwell, Jessie Willcox Smith, Maxfield Parrish and N. C. Wyeth can be admired alongside those of famous cartoonists such as Winsor McCay, Frank Frazetta and George Herriman, of muralists such as Judith F. Baca and Diego Rivera, who are joined by Frida Kahlo, Charles White, Utagawa Kuniyoshi and Robert Colescott.
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The world's first museum capturing artificial intelligence
Anticipation is also growing, meanwhile, for another opening, that of Dataland, the world's first museum focused entirely on artificial intelligence, for which the visionary Turkish media artist Refik Anadol, together with his wife and co-founder Efsun Erkılıç, is currently finalising the last details. Located in The Grand LA complex, it will house installations and an open source archive based on audio, visual and environmental data, even incorporating AI-generated scents. Meanwhile, at the Los Angeles Breakfast Club, celebrating its first 100 years, people prefer to have breakfast while listening to music and cultural speeches, while Marouch is the right place to savour the melting pot, also gastronomic, of West Hollywood: on the border between Thai Town and Little Armenia, it offers the Middle Eastern traditions of the meze in a contemporary sauce. Café Tropical reopened a few months ago the historic bakery that two Cuban brothers had opened in 1975 between Sunset Boulevard and Silver Lake, reintroducing those cheese-filled pastelitos that had made this Miami-style bistro famous.
Where Marilyn Monroe loved to sleep
At the Avalon Hotel, you can ask to sleep in the room that Marilyn Monroe loved: one of the diva's favourite locations for her photo shoots was her flower-shaped swimming pool. Film lovers should also stay at the legendary Chateau Marmont, the hotel built in 1929 by copying a chateau in the Loire Valley, where film stars and starlets spend long stays while waiting for a good script or while shooting a film. Sofia Coppola, who knows it well, set the film Somewhere there. The director will have been among the visitors to the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, designed by Renzo Piano by enlarging and remodelling the iconic Saban Building on Wilshire and Fairfax in the Miracle Mile, on which a transparent sphere has been set, offering a dreamlike view of the Hollywood Hills. After all, the aim of this museum is precisely to take visitors into all the gears of the dream factory that is the cinema, accompanying them behind the scenes: until 26 July 2026 it hosts "Jaws: The Exhibition", an exhibition dedicated to Steven Spielberg's Jaws, which has just turned 50, while "Hollywoodland: Jewish Founders and the Making of a Movie Capital" investigates the Jewish origin of the first filmmakers.
The heights of the Vasquez Rocks may look like an artificial backdrop, but they create a spectacular natural landscape, perfect for an autumn trek: located in the ancestral village of the Tataviam Native American tribe in Agua Dulce, this park has a jaw-dropping geology in which the rocky peaks sport diamond shapes, spires and splinters, not surprisingly chosen by many film productions and also loved by trekkers and horse-riding enthusiasts for the trails that within the Vasquez Rocks cross a section of the Pacific Crest Trail. A few kilometres from Los Angeles offers another wild landscape, Malibu Creek State Park, with its twenty-four-kilometre-long web of trails that includes streams and monumental trees, set for famous series such as The Planet of the Apes and M.A.S.H.
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