Hitoshi Abe Book

Born in 1962, Hitoshi Abe is widely considered to be one of the most interesting young architects working in Japan today. After obtaining his Master's degree at the Southern California Institute of Architecture, he worked for Coop Himmelb(l)au in their Los Angeles office before obtaining his Ph.D. from Tohoku University and setting up his own practice, Atelier Hitoshi Abe, in 1992. Since then, he has won a wide variety of commissions in Japan. He was identified as one of the key emerging talents in contemporary architecture in 10 x 10, published by Phaidon in 2000. He has also taught at several architecture schools, including the Tohoku Institute of Technology and the University of California Berkeley, and, in 2007, he was made chair of the Department of Architecture and Urban Design at the University of California Los Angeles. Abe is the youngest person ever to hold this position.

Abe's architecture is characterized by complex spatial arrangements and a sensitivity to the surrounding environment and the people who will use the building. His Kanno Museum arranges the rooms of the exhibition space around each other in a complex of angled walls and irregular shapes that stem from an abstract geometric concept. The result is a sequence of dynamic rooms that are dependent on each other for their form. In his Miyagi Stadium, Abe shows an awareness of the surroundings, incorporating the structure of the stadium into the contours of the hill, echoing the physical form of the hill in the curves of the stands. Abe's bold architectural plans and ability to master an impressive range of building types mark him out as one of the most promising architects working today.

Paul Glassman - Library Journal

One of the younger exponents of Japanese modernism, Hitoshi Abe may be the Philip Johnson of the 21st century, eclectically bridging European and Asian practices. His cool, refined, highly articulate-yet often derivative-work relates with great intelligence to the formal concerns of his modernist antecedents Alvar Aalto, Erich Mendelsohn, Kenzo Tange, Glenn Murcutt, and Tadao Ando. But whether working with structural expressionism, volumetric rhythm, or surface texture, Abe brings to each of his designs attention to detail, geometric precision, and a mastery of light. Pollock (Modern Japanese House) uses three conceptual sections-line, surface, and volume-to classify each of 26 projects, which she describes perhaps more in promotional than critical terms. Fifty high-quality, black-and-white and 300 color photographs illustrate each building entry, and small plans, sections, and conceptual diagrams (essentially isometric projections) add value to the graphic material. As the recently appointed chair of the Department of Architecture and Urban Design at the University of California, Los Angeles, Abe will influence American design education increasingly. An important addition, then, to architecture school library collections.