Hitoshi Abe is a professor and former Chair in the Department of Architecture and Urban Design at UCLA and the Director of the UCLA Paul I. and Hisako Terasaki Center for Japanese Studies.
Since 1992, when he established Atelier Hitoshi Abe, Dr. Abe has maintained an active international design practice based in Sendai, Japan. As a successful designer and educator who continuously lectures and publishes throughout his career, Hitoshi Abe has earned a position among the leaders in the field of Architecture and Urban Design for his ability to initiate productive interdisciplinary collaborations and establish professional partnerships with various constituencies. With growing geography in its portfolio, Atelier Hitoshi Abe opened its second office in Los Angeles in 2008. In 2011, together with a group of Japanese Architects, Hitoshi Abe initiated the Arch-Aid network—a voluntary network of architects established to help reconstruct the damaged community by the 2011 East Japan Great Earthquake and Tsunami. In 2017, he opened the xLAB at UCLA, which serves as an international think tank that examines architecture’s elastic boundaries through interdisciplinary collaboration.
