Hitoshi Abe is a Professor and former Chair in the Department of Architecture and Urban Design at the School of Arts and the Director of the UCLA Paul I. and Hisako Terasaki Center for Japanese Studies. In the International Institute at UCLA, he holds the Terasaki Chair for Contemporary Japanese Study.

Since 1992, when Dr. Abe won first prize in the Miyagi Stadium Competition and established Atelier Hitoshi Abe, he has maintained an active international design practice based in Sendai, Japan.  As a successful architect and educator who continuously lectures and publishes throughout his career, Hitoshi Abe has earned a position among the leaders in the field for his ability to initiate productive interdisciplinary collaborations and establish professional partnerships with various constituencies.

Known for architecture that is spatially complex and structurally innovative, the work of Atelier Hitoshi Abe has been published internationally and received numerous awards in Japan and worldwide, With growing geography in its portfolio, Atelier Hitoshi Abe opened its second office in Los Angeles in 2008. Its most recent works include a departmental building on the New Campus of the Vienna University of Economics and Business (WU), and the 3M Headquarters building in St. Paul, Minnesota, Hotlinks, for Brad Pitts’ Make It Right Foundation in the Lower Ninth Ward in New Orleans, and Terasaki Research Institute in Westwood, Los Angeles.

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 Research Center at UCLA, which serves as an international think tank that examines architecture’s elastic boundaries through interdisciplinary collaboration.