Every building starts as somebody's idea of what a building could be. This one started with a studio named after a forest, and a three-word brief that the finished house still answers exactly.
Specification
- Studio
- SOOP — Miami, Cincinnati and Seoul
- Principal
- Hyejin Yang, Principal of Architecture and Interior Design
- Florida license
- Registered Architect AR100091 — active
- Also registered
- South Korea
- Education
- M.Arch with Distinction, The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL (2012); B.Arch, Hongik University, Seoul (2002)
- Before SOOP
- Oppenheim Architecture, Miami, 2013–2019; Baum Architects, Seoul, 2008–2010; FONT, Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, 2006–2007
- Recognised
- Honorable Mention, 20th and 22nd National Exhibition, South Korea
- Published
- Author, Architectural Imagination and Storytelling: Bartlett Scenarios (Mimesis, 2014); contributor, Spirit of Place — Oppenheim Architecture (Tra Publishing, 2019)
- @studio.soop
Licensure is from the Florida DBPR public record. The practice history, the publications and the studio’s social account were supplied by Hyejin Yang directly, by email, on 19 August 2026, and corrected three entries that had been wrong on this page. Everything else is SOOP’s own published material. Nothing here is inferred.
From the build team
Very polite, very professional, and thorough. She managed the drawings in such a manner that we could perform all of Leslie's on-the-go design changes and still get accurate shop drawings out of them — which is the part nobody sees and everybody depends on.
Leslie would go on to say that among all of the people who worked on his site, the architect was the single one who never made a mistake. As hard as that is to believe on a building this ambitious, there is no record that she made a single critical one.
The constant presence, the participation, the monitoring, the quick responses and the attention to detail are what carried this ambitious design all the way to a finished house.
Academia Development Corp — general contractor
Architecture. Interior. Design.
“SOOP,” meaning ‘forest’ in Korean, embodies the belief that architecture should be an enriching experience — evoking the joy of exploration, the thrill of discovery, and the serenity of rest, just like a walk through a forest.
SOOP, in their own words
- Monolithic
- “A striking monument within the colorful streets.”
- Interlocking
- “A flexible flow between all elements of the structure.”
- Blended
- “A harmonious integration with its natural surroundings.”
SOOP’s own account of the site is specific in two ways. The house stands “just two streets from the historic Calle Ocho” — the Little Havana that gives the street its character. And at the back, the plan is “sheltered by an existing ficus tree and the rear garden.”
The word carrying the weight there is existing. The ficus was on the lot before the drawings were, and it stayed. The studio also files the project under the same name the family uses for it: Leslie House.
Where the three words came from
The vision above — monolithic, interlocking, blended — is not a description written after the fact. In June 2019, before SOOP existed and under her own name, Hyejin Yang assembled a concept deck for this house in which each of those three words opens its own chapter with a drawing in her hand. The chapters also gather reference images from other architects’ work; those were hers to study, not ours to republish, so only her own drawings appear here. The deck is titled Concept Options and runs to a hundred and one pages.
How she works
SOOP supplied twenty-three pages of sketchbook for this record — the site studied before anything is proposed, three scenarios drawn far enough to be rejected, and a whole page of small folded shapes tried one after another until one of them becomes a roof. Seventeen of them are published, in the order she thought rather than the order she filed.
Render, and what got built.
Every drawing is an argument about a building that does not exist yet. These are SOOP’s, beside photographs taken from as near the same position as a drone can hold.
Renders: SOOP. Photographs: Kahu Visionworks.
Hyejin Yang
Principal of Architecture and Interior Design, SOOP
Registered Architect, Florida and South Korea
Hyejin Yang holds an M.Arch from the Bartlett School of Architecture at UCL, awarded with Distinction, and was at Oppenheim Architecture from 2013 to 2019 — on work in Aspen, Bali, Liechtenstein and Saudi Arabia — and before that at Baum Architects in Seoul and FONT in Ulaanbaatar, before establishing SOOP in 2020. She is also the author of Architectural Imagination and Storytelling: Bartlett Scenarios (Mimesis, 2014). Her graduate research built a digital tool that translated traditional Korean calligraphy into landscape; it was exhibited in Seoul in 2013.
SOOP works from Miami and Cincinnati across hospitality, cultural, religious and residential projects. Leslie House is the studio’s flagship independent commission.
Her hand
The sketch stands up.
Her INTERLOCKING sketch — two rectangles drawn three times, apart, notched, then locked — resolving into the massing study it produced. The idea and the form, in that order.
On site
The architect at the stair.
The stair going in, with the architect, the owners and the site walking it together. A drawing of a circular stair is a promise about geometry; this is the day it is kept or it is not. Hyejin Yang was in the building for it.
