Warp factor - Brief Article

Architectural Review, The, Oct, 2001

Hitoshi Abe's architecture is hard to pin down, principally because he treats the architectural process as a voyage of discovery, a personal reading of site and circumstance. Wolf Prix (of Coop Himmelblau) remembers Abe's student work at SCI-Arc in the late 1980s. 'It was strangely precise, very decisive, and supported by a spatial emotionality'.

Distinguished by an ascetic use of materials and a sense of drama, this little restaurant exploits space and light to intriguing effect.

Those qualities are certainly manifest in design of the Miyagi stadium (p62). But the faintly surreal quality present in that building is more evident in the series of individual and wholly original structures that preceded it: a bridge lined either side by an undulating metal structure, its bristling projections blossoming with street lights; a water tower which, in a visual inversion of engineering power, is sheathed in steel mesh and ivy (described by one observer as an architectural negligee), a guest house conceived as space wrapped in a 90m ribbon of wood. 'Form', Abe observes, '... exists as the border of inside and outside and it is the medium to share information from one to the other.'

Such a transcendental perspective draws attention to the fact that. Abe is fundamentally a Japanese architect. In his introduction to the catalogue of a recent exhibition of Abe's work the critic, Yoshitake Doi, notes a parallel between his approach and that of lssey Miyake, suggesting that just as the dress designer describes the body with fabric, 'Abe folds a ribbon ... into the landscape to create the space on site'.

In this small scheme, the design of the Neige Lune Fleur restaurant in Sendai, Abe has again employed an undulating ribbon to describe space. The wider landscape is here represented by a long thin rectangular room. Two twisting walls, their two-dimensional undulations derived from combining two wave cycles, divide reception, cloakroom an lavatories from the restaurant and bar. The walls form a maple lined corridor that, richly illuminated and with surfaces (including a sloping concrete floor) moving in all directions, dramatizes the act of entry and generates intriguing, odd-shape spaces. The inner wall continues its journey, cut out to create an angled arch over the bar opposite the row of tables that make up the tiny restaurant.

Materials and finishes are spare; apart from the twisting walls which, underneath the maple lining, are plasterboard, restaurant walls are simply plastered and floors polished concrete. Suspended planes, forming ceilings, are ringed with light emanating from cunningly concealed sources.

Architect

Atelier Hitoshi Abe, Sendai

1 Compressed corridor framed by canted wall planes leads from the entrance to the dining space.

2 Compact dining room exudes a spirit of asceticism.

3 Concealed fittings emit dramatic fissures of light.