Inside the Real-Life Sandcrawler Lucasfilm Built in Singapore

Photo via Arch Daily

With all the talk about the $1B vanity museum that George Lucas is bringing to Chicago, it’s worth stopping for a moment to consider the fact that the Star Wars creator has already plucked a moving fortress from dunes of Tatooine and dropped it in a Singapore office park. Officially opened on January 16, and featured yesterday on Arch Daily, the regional HQ of Lucasfilm Singapore is modelled after a Sandcrawler, those caterpillar-tracked fortresses inhabited by the diminutive hooded Jawas. Of course, this one trades the energy furnaces, workshops, and armored plating that made its fictional counterpart a perfect mobile live/work space for the scrap scavengers that inhabited them for nine stories of glass-wrapped modern offices, but still! There is a building in the world based on a Sandcrawler, which is pretty unequivocally worth a Tusken Raider cheer.

A recent article in Architectural Review claimed that the packed-in Star Wars references—white and metallic lobbies that look like air locks, meter-high Yoda sculptures in bronze—trivialized «an immensely elegant and sophisticated building.» As architect Andrew Bromberg, of the Hong Kong international practice Aedas tells it, this elegant form arose from «a logical outcome of the zoning restrictions» dictating the heigh and slope of the roof, eliding whose decision it was to make the building look like the mining vehicles that the Czerka Corporation left on Tatooine around the time of the Sith Wars.

The building also contains a «state-of-the-art 100-seat private theatre» and a «lush courtyard.» The Sandcrawler is it’s actual name, and was selected, according to the Architectural Review, by a vote held at LucasArts. The result was unanimous.

Photo via Arch Daily

Photo via Arch Daily