I’ve long since made peace with the fact that Kanye West is a land of contradictions. Dude is smart enough to make music as brilliant as My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, emotional enough to develop video games about his mother going to Heaven, and also dumb enough to support Trump. So after hearing the news that the rapper wants to make something as sci-fi #brand dystopian as Star Wars-themed housing projects, all I can do is shrug and hope his next album still slaps.
According to an interview with Forbes, West revealed his plans for low-income housing visually styled after Star Wars architecture. Specifically, West and his team are modeling the aesthetic after Luke Skywalker’s desert dome hut from the A New Hope. But whereas that 1977 movie was famously shot in Tunisia, West’s construction was looking at California, which doubled as Tatooine in later films.
Think this.
Although it might end up more like this.
While there were no actual pictures of the prefabricated homes, West shared plenty of ambitious details in the interview. The “oblong” buildings would be “dozens of feet tall” and potentially sunken into the ground with upper skylights. And all kidding aside, more artful housing for the poor is an admirable goal if it actually works.
West is currently meeting with potential investors but it doesn’t sound like Disney and Lucasfilm have anything officially to do with this. So don’t expect any explicit Star Wars branding, which is probably for the best when it comes to homeless shelters.
Who knows whether or not Kanye West’s Star Wars houses will ever become a reality and not just a delightfully weird thing to imagine. I’m still waiting for his Nintendo Wii album. But in the meantime if you want to live in the world of Star Wars for a couple of hours, you can visit the Star Wars Galaxy’s Edge theme parks.
