The studio was formed by Japanese architect, Dr. Hitoshi Abe. He studied at the Southern California Institute of Architecture and obtained his master’s degree there in 1989. He founded the Hitoshi Abe studio in 1992. Hitoshi Abe received his doctorate from Tohoku University in 1993. Among all the projects by Atelier Hitoshi Abe, Miyagi Stadium, which he built in 2000.
The project kick-started his career and he received a Building Contractors Society Award for it in 2001. His works became internationally published and he received numerous awards for them. His projects are more widely known for their architecture that is spatially complex and structurally innovative.
Here are the 15 iconic projects by Atelier Hitoshi Abe that you should know about.
1. Terasaki Research Institute
Building Type: Office/Laboratory with street-level retail
Size: 15,500 SQ. FT.
Location: Los Angeles, California
Year: 2017
Photography: ©Roland Halbe
The purpose of establishing the institute is to strengthen and expand community outreach by providing new opportunities for public participation. The facility accommodates offices, laboratories, and multi-purpose collaboration spaces.
Composed of a wide corridor, the interior provides a multi-purpose space, including a bookstore and a reading room. This extends from the main facade to the entire length of the ground floor.
The two atria are located in the middle of the entire internal space and are closed by only translucent double membranes. The atria diffuse sunlight and minimize the use of artificial sunlight.
2. JU B21
Building Type: Faculty of Pharmaceutical Science: Lecture Rooms, Labs, Classrooms, and Offices
Size: 121,300 SQ. FT.
Location: Saitama, Japan
Year: 2017
Photography: ©Kenichi Suzuki
Atelier Hitoshi Abe this nine-story building was built to realize the university’s ambition to strengthen the continuity and connectivity of the entire campus. The structure consists of a horizontal motif, visible from the front, and is a gesture that will incorporate future development, as it will help define a new identity for the campus.
The structure is approximately 95 meters long and 17 meters wide. The building includes course areas such as classrooms, laboratory spaces, and teacher office areas.
3. MMH
Building Type: Reception Hall with Auditorium, Gallery, Conference Rooms, and Offices
Size: 19,500 SQ. FT.
Location: Saitama, Japan
Year: 2017
Photography: Kenichi Suzuki
To recognize the 50-year commemoration of Josai University’s establishment, Atelier Hitoshi Abe made this Memorial Hall. This multi-utilitarian construction incorporates a hall, pre-work zone, kitchen, workplaces, and an originator’s room. The key concept behind MMH was to build up a design that would fill in as advantageous interaction in the slope.
The design connects the normal scene, encompassing and winding its way through the grounds, which finds some kind of harmony between the natural and built environment. The principal space in the structure is the Founder’s Room, which is a double-height space, set contiguous to the main atrium.
The room diagrams the historical backdrop of the University alongside the celebrated existence of Mikio Mizuta, who was the originator of Josai University.
4. Vienna University of Economics and Business Campus (Campus WU)
Building Type: Educational Mixed-Use Facility
Size: 225,000 SQ. FT.
Location: Vienna, Austria
Year: 2013
Photography: ©Duccio Malagamba
This is one of the most all-around applauded projects of Atelier Hitoshi Abe. It won a few honors, including the Vienna Municipal Council Schorsche Award and Architectural Digest Best New Global University Buildings, both in 2013.
The concept of this plan was to build up a technique that would boost adaptability, advance the connection between the different scholarly divisions, and take into consideration a serious level of penetrability across the site. To achieve this, an arrangement of thin covering volumes was orchestrated along the length of the side.
Likewise, the space between every volume is an atrium. The atrium not just gives freedom to students and staff to run into each other, yet also assembles while at the same time intervening in the inside climate by directing wind current and day lightning.
5. F-Town Building
Building Type: Restaurant
Size: 1,997 SQ. FT.
Location: Sendai, Miyagi Prefecture, Japan
Year: 2007
Photography: ©Daici Ano
This seven-story building is a café tower that was intended to oblige an assortment of bars and diners. The structure won a few honors, including the Finishing Technology Award for 2008.
The interiors follow the development of the center and shell and base frameworks. Since the site was small, the studio chose to improve the spatial assortment by building up an optional dissemination framework.
Moreover, the construction additionally has voids that interface the spaces of each stream in a circling twisting course of action. This results in duplication of potential routes, vertically and on a level plane, to each occupant space.
6. Kanno Museum
Building Type: Museum
Size: 638.5 SQ. FT.
Location: Shiogama, Miyagi Prefecture, Japan
Year: 2006
Photography: ©Daici Ano
This is another of the all-around adulated projects of Atelier Hitoshi Abe. It won the Annual Architectural Design Commendation and the International Architecture Award in 2007. The historical center is situated on a bumpy site with a pleasant perspective on the Pacific Ocean.
This private exhibition for all time shows eight sculptures. The studio concludes that as opposed to building up a fundamental white 3D square, they would plan an exhibition remarkable scene, where explicit spaces intended to oblige a solitary model are total inside a foreordained 10m x 12m x 10m volume.
The motivation behind this design is the sensitive construction found in the limit between soap bubbles.
7. Miyahara Children’s Clinic
Building Type: Residence and Clinic
Size: 379 SQ. FT.
Location: Saitama, Saitama Prefecture, Japan
Year: 2006
Photography: ©Daici Ano
Atelier Hitoshi Abe designed this structure that fills in as a home as well as a pediatric clinic. The client was a young couple who wanted to have a house for their children. The ground floor of the structure exclusively includes the clinic, though the family’s basic spaces such as common rooms are on the first floor, and the subsequent floor just has private rooms.
The regular space for the family is situated at the center of the structure, encased by a terrace/garden that gives an alleviating view and also serves as a buffer from the surroundings.
8. Tohoku Centennial Hall
Building Type: Concert and Conference Hall
Size: 5,911 SQ. FT.
Location: Sendai, Miyagi Prefecture, Japan
Year: 2008
Photography: ©Daici Ano
This concert and conference hall was redesigned to harmonize with the 100th college of Tohoku University. The current structure was fabricated fifty years after the establishment of the school. Nonetheless, Atelier Hitoshi Abe changed the old structure into a shoe-box assembly room with seismic retrofit and moved up to every specialized framework.
The renovated amphitheater is presently an appealing focus because catalyzes progressing social advancement inside the neighboring local area.
9. Aoba-Tei
Building Type: Restaurant
Size: 220 SQ. FT.
Location: Sendai, Miyagi Prefecture, Japan
Year: 2004
Photography: ©Daici Ano
This French restaurant won the first prize in the Catering Facilities Category. The building faces Jozenji Street in Sendai city. Atelier Hitoshi Abe worked on this small project by embedding an inward divider made of thin perforated steel plates within the building.
This creates a soft boundary between the first and second floors, and connects the internal space of the restaurant with the space characterized by the acclaimed zelkova trees that represent Sendai.
10. Sasaki-Gishi Prosthetic
Building Type: Office
Size: 857 SQ. FT.
Location: Sendai, Miyagi Prefecture, Japan
Year: 2004
Photography: ©Daici Ano
Projects of Atelier Hitoshi Abe have consistently been known to have outstanding calculation and volume. This is the case for this design that was coordinated around a focal 6m x 6m x 6m box floating in mid-air.
The structure was intended for an office and plant for the creation of prostheses. All sightlines are centered around the subsequent inside yard, which guarantees spatial progression and builds up the feeling of common space between the workplace and industrial facility representatives.
Concerning the outside underlying dividers, these are made of precast cement and are stacked and afterward post-pushed. This results in a checkerboard plan between the construction and windows.
11. Reihoku Community Hall
Building Type: Community Hall
Size: 394 SQ. FT.
Location: Kumamoto, Kumamoto Prefecture, Japan
Year: 2002
Photography: ©Daici Ano
The point behind this community hall was to make a minimized, high-efficiency box that joins the elements of a public assembly room and a public venue in a similar space. This overlap of the program increments spatial productivity but then each capacity possibly gets clear when important.
The volume framed because of this overlap comprises one huge open region, in which the principle exercises are houses. Moreover, the plan additionally has an assortment of more modest volumes all through the edge to oblige auxiliary capacities.
12. Miyagi Stadium
Building Type: Stadium
Size: 36,685 SQ. FT.
Location: Rifu, Miyagi Prefecture, Japan
Year: 2000
Photography: ©Shunicni Atsumi
This is one of the most popular and profoundly commended projects of Atelier Hitoshi Abe. Miyagi Stadium could be considered as a kickstart in Hitoshi Abe’s career. The project won a few honors, including the 42nd Building Contractors Society Award.
The arena depends on the geometry of concentric circles obtained from the fundamental capacity of spectators and setting up an essential issue of core interest. This geometry creates a strong sense of enclosure as well as isolates observers from their outside environmental factors.
13. JU B22
Building Type: Faculty of Pharmaceutical Science: Lecture Rooms, Labs
Size: 8,380 SQ. FT.
Location: Saitama, Japan
Year: 2019
Photography: ©Daici Ano
This structure is intended to reverberate and fortify the symbolic library building tower while interfacing the focal square. JU B22 also serves as an associating hub to a current pharmaceutical science building taken cover behind other existing grounds structures and gives it an interface.
The first four floors of the design feature auditoriums and are associated with a fabulous flight of stairs. While the main three floors include pharmaceutical office labs and course rooms. There is a passage tower in the design that underlines verticality regards and identifies with the nearby Library Tower, while within the chamber gives a delicate light well-fitting for a learning environment.
14. Project Community
Building Type: Commercial
Size: 260,000 SQ. FT.
Location: St. Paul, Minnesota, United States
Year: 2013
Photography: ©Daici Ano
Atelier Hitoshi Abe was approached to design a master plan to revive and modernize key campus facilities and spaces for a Fortune 500 Company Headquarters based in St, Paul, Minnesota.
The fundamental quad of the current grounds comprises a 15-story tower built in the mid-1960s and three other low-ascent structures developed in the mid-1970s. The entirety of the structures is associated with a subsequent level sky-way and is sited along the edge of a focal parking area. To offset these spaces with the requests of a contemporary imaginative office, AHA built up a groundbreaking strategy in which select spaces, modified for correspondence and coordinated effort, were deliberately embedded in key regions of the quad to support the casual gathering, conversation, and encourage cooperation among different divisions.
15. Make it Right – Hot Links
Building Type: Duplex Residence
Size: 1,800 SQ. FT.
Location: Lower 9th District, New Orleans
Year: 2013
Photography: ©Daici Ano
This venture of AHA offers various choices for keen living. Through the inborn adaptability of its association, this house can oblige numerous game plans of single-family, various family, leaseholder, and occupant and live/work courses of action.
AHA joins two shotgun houses together that can open, close, or divide the space between. This makes a lot bigger open spaces for private rooms or public living spaces. The adaptable limit between the homes can be delicate and adjust to the changing necessities of a family consistently.
