It’s all part of life
HITOSHI ABE is not sure what awaits him when he takes over as chair of UCLA’s department of architecture and urban design. But he knows exactly what he’s leaving behind in his hometown of Sendai.
An aging father and a teenage son from a previous marriage. The architectural firm he has been building since the early 1990s and whose projects have left his imprint on the city he loves.
And then there’s the buzz he gets from leading his atelier’s soccer team in the annual A Cup.
The 44-year-old Abe is the founder and organizer of this one-day tournament for architects, started five years ago to see which firm in Japan could put together the best soccer team. It is a signature example of his talent for creating a “platform,” he says, slipping into professional jargon, the same principle that led him to create such events as the annual workshops that bring together architecture students from six universities in four countries to tackle a single theme over a two-week period.
“The power of an event is that it can be the seed for a community to come together, whether it is for students or for soccer,” Abe says in an interview in his Sendai office, nursing the aches from this autumn’s A Cup played the day before. That philosophy, he says, formed the heart of his pitch to UCLA when he was interviewed for the job.
“I don’t know the reason why they picked me, although I can guess,” says Abe, who acknowledges he is not one of Japan’s best-known architects, even in Japan. “I made a presentation of the activities I’ve done and said that the most important thing in education is to create a platform which everyone can use to pursue their own way of thinking.
“I was on my way to creating such a platform here, so I’m sorry, in a way, that I have to leave,” he says. “Now, the question I ask myself is: How do you do this in the United States?”
Barring a last-minute administrative calamity, Abe will get his chance beginning this spring when he takes over from outgoing chair Sylvia Lavin at UCLA. Under Lavin, the UCLA department turned its focus to the changes in architecture brought on by new technologies and digital design, a radical shift that many observers say raised the school’s profile while bruising faculty egos and chasing away some longtime professors.
By choosing as her successor an architect widely known for his easygoing, friendly personality, the school signaled its desire to calm the turmoil in its academic warrens. But Abe’s appointment will mark an aesthetic turning as well. Lavin’s gaze was fixed toward the East Coast and beyond to Europe. Abe brings his Japanese sensibilities to the job, along with a host of contacts among Japanese architects he hopes to entice across the Pacific to offer a greater East Asian perspective to UCLA students.
“UCLA is located in a good place -- it can be a hub that looks to South America and the Pacific Rim,” Abe says. “Everybody around the world knows L.A. and its fusion of people from different cultures. I say: Why don’t we take a chance and try to connect this network?”
The decision to uproot and move to UCLA marks the second time Abe will leave Sendai for Los Angeles. After completing an undergraduate degree at Sendai’s Tohoku University and interning for a short spell in Shigeru Ban’s Tokyo office (“I never even met him,” Abe says of one of Japan’s most famous architects), he moved to L.A. in 1987, a pilgrimage to study at the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc), where he earned a master’s degree.
Abe arrived in L.A. speaking no English and says he fell in love with the city. Swore he’d never leave.
“Downtown was a much scarier place then; syringes lying around,” he recalls. “It felt so different from being in Japan. In Japan, the city is not exposed. The city protects you.
“In L.A., the city is naked. It’s scary. But you also feel free.”
Yet he did leave, returning to Sendai in 1992 after one of his designs -- drawn while he was working at the Coop Himmelb(l)au in L.A. -- won the competition to design the Miyagi sports stadium in the city’s suburbs. “I never wanted to leave L.A.,” Abe says. “I only came back because I won a competition.” But he slipped comfortably back into Sendai, resisting Japan’s architectural gravity that pulls most of the ambitious to Tokyo, 180 miles to the south. Instead, Abe opened his own atelier in this old castle town of 1 million people that is the transportation and service hub for the north of Japan’s main island, and began winning commissions to build everything from water towers to guest houses and bridges.
But it is Miyagi Stadium that is at once Abe’s biggest work and arguably biggest disappointment. The stadium was chosen to be one of the venues for soccer’s 2002 World Cup, co-hosted by Japan and South Korea, and the enthusiastic reviews of the design pegged Abe as a rising star in Japanese architecture. His design was hailed for what he described as an attempt to break with the traditional enclosed oval that has defined stadiums since early Roman times.
Abe’s stadium rises gently out of the side of a hill, nestled into the sloping landscape so you hardly notice it’s there as you approach from the front. The two distinct roofs of its swirling design stretch over the stands but leave the field exposed to the elements, and the color of the grandstands fades from dark blue to lighter blue to white to reflect the colors of the sky.
The stadium interior also includes a walkway that allows anyone passing by, but without a ticket, to get a glimpse of the action inside as they stroll past. Security officials, horrified at the dangers of such open access, sealed the passage off for the World Cup.
It was a sign of things to come. Other than hosting one major pop concert, Miyagi, with a capacity of 49,000, has barely been used since the 2002 World Cup. Sendai’s professional baseball and soccer teams opted to play in more intimate venues closer to the center of town, and entering Miyagi now is a ghostly experience, its counters and ramparts still almost spotless, the names of the World Cup nations who competed there still posted, the brief spell of glory gone.
It hurts the man who built it. “I love that stadium,” Abe says. “I’m sorry it’s not being used.”
An economic squeeze
There have since been no projects to match the size and ambition of Miyagi. The Japanese economy was rupturing just as Abe returned home, diving on the collapse of over-speculation in real estate and banks swimming in bad loans. And the end of the free-spending era in which every Japanese city and town demanded its own civic monument put the squeeze on small ateliers.
Even as the private sector economy has recovered in the last three years, financing remains tight and clients look to get buildings up quickly and efficiently. That has directed more and more business to Japan’s big construction conglomerates, which have their own in-house design shops.
The business landscape has also forced smaller firms to look abroad for work, and this partly accounts for the current prominence of Japanese architects overseas, not just in the West but in China and Southeast Asia as well. One current Abe project is a resort in Vietnam. But in Japan, boutique firms have been forced to scramble for work designing houses and small offices, and Abe’s atelier has done its share of restaurants, dental offices and hair salons. He did bid on some high-profile commercial retail projects, such as the new Dior building in Ginza, that have hogged so much attention in architectural circles here. But those luxury-brand retail stores are mere skins: The architects design the eye-glue exteriors but have no say over the interior design.
“Abe does not fit expectations for Japanese architects, who are often under pressure to make visually arresting projects,” says Dana Buntrock, an associate professor of architecture at UC Berkeley who has worked and lived off and on in Japan since the late 1980s and describes herself as a friend and fan. “He is a humane designer, concerned with the experience of being in a building.
“He is much more about space and light, and how that space can feel big. The Diors and the Vuittons are all about big flash on the exterior. Abe’s designs don’t have enough flash for them.”
Seeking global perspective
The best examples of those interiors are in and around Sendai. There is the striking restaurant Aoba-tei that has become legendary, in part because it is so seldom seen: The owner has opted to keep it for private functions only. Abe designed everything from the restaurant’s walnut tables to its bar stools. But the atmosphere comes from walls on which images of leaves appear on sheets of perforated steel. Lighted from behind, the effect resembles a forest of the zelkova trees for which Sendai is known.
Abe has also designed an intriguing museum, the Kanno museum, to house a private collection of sculptures. The building’s sloping walls, built from ship panels welded together in a novel way, give the sense of descending into the bowels of a boat, while ambient light sneaks in to remove any claustrophobia.
The museum is also off the beaten path, tucked away in a residential neighborhood, but Abe is sanguine about the projects. He says the museum receives far more visitors than it would if the building design were not so interesting, and he remains optimistic that the restaurant owner will one day open to the public.
But he laments too that architects are failing to connect to their communities, contending that he is more interested in the impact architecture has on people than he is in the design for its own sake. “Japan has lots of nice buildings, but they are too expensive to maintain and totally isolated from the local community,” he says.
That has led him to experiment with options for hollowed out urban spaces. When asked to find a way to light a rundown, desolate neighborhood of Sendai, he opted instead to keep the area dark and project movies onto an outdoor screen at night. “It’s about finding the value of a place,” Abe says. “You need to stimulate other activities and change the way people see their environment bit by bit.”
Abe knows that those ideas may not necessarily translate into an American context. The notion of turning L.A.’s darkened lots into drive-in theaters, for example, is probably a recipe for mayhem. “Different strategies for different places,” he acknowledges.
He does not expect it to be easy. Abe will have to wrestle with the byzantine politics of American academia. Budgets. Hiring. Maybe even firing. He says he still wants to commute back to Sendai every month or so to oversee his atelier and visit his teenage son, Yo, and he will have to ease his unilingual Japanese wife, Mariko, and their son, Haruto, 1 1/2 , into life in Los Angeles.
“But I asked everyone I knew if I should try it at UCLA, and every single person said yes -- except for my father who is living in Sendai,” he says with a rueful smile.
All the hassles are worth it, he says, for a chance to see what all the fuss about Japanese design looks like from outside his own country.
“Now that Japanese architecture and design are seen as cool in the rest of the world, I’m interested in seeing how Japan is seen from abroad,” he says. “My question is: How global can it be?”