SOOP’s concept drawing for this house sets three circles in a row and names them: SPIRAL STAIR, POOL, BANYAN TREE HOUSE. A fourth note reads SECRET GARDEN, and the stair is marked GRAND ENTRY. Everything the house is known for — the circular glass stair, the round pool carried on the roof structure, the tree left standing at the back — is already on that one page, in that order, before any of it was engineered. The pages below are the working-out.
Why a sketchbook is worth publishing
Presentation drawings argue for a result. Sketchbooks show the arguing. These pages
carry the options that did not get built, the section drawn twice against the same
tree, and a whole page of small folded shapes being tried one after another until one
of them turns into a roof.
It matters here because the three things this house is known for are not
decorations added late. They are on the first page, named, in a row. What changed
between that page and the building was not the idea — it was every question the
idea raised.
Specification
Drawn by
Hyejin Yang, SOOP
Medium
Ink, pencil and colour on sketchbook paper
Pages supplied
Seventeen
Named on the concept plan
Spiral stair · pool · banyan tree house · secret garden
Provided
By the architect, for this record
Every drawing on this page was supplied by SOOP for publication here. The captions describe what is visible in each drawing; the words in quotation marks are the architect’s own annotations, read off the page. Nothing is inferred about intent.
The whole design
Twenty-nine seconds, seven years.
The design in one continuous pass: the first searching scribble tightens into a measured section, the section takes colour and becomes a plan, the plan stands up into a diagram, the diagram is built as a physical model, and the roof plan resolves into the finished house from the air. Every frame is the architect's own material.
The sketchbook
Working it out.
The lot, before anything
Two photographs of 913 SW 15 Avenue as it stood. Everything that follows had to answer to this ground, and to the tree on it.
01The lot from above, marked up before anything was proposed: the site outlined, the buffer to the neighbours, the view out, and the path of the sun.02The lot as it was. A pink two-storey building, a chain-link fence, and the canopy that would outlive both. Everything after this page is about what replaces it — and what does not.
The first page
One sheet, on its own. The site looked at before anything is proposed — options gridded out small, colour tried and abandoned, nothing yet committed to.
03Where it starts. Site studies, a grid of massing options, and the colour notes that go with them — the page before there is a building.
The first sketchbook
Nineteen pages, and it opens with shapes that have no edges yet. Watch the drawings harden: blobs become volumes, volumes acquire a section, and the section starts arguing with a tree.
04Before it had edges. Curved and blobbed studies, the massing still being felt for rather than drawn.05The section drawn against the tree, twice, working out what the house does about something already standing on the lot.06The sheet that carries the project’s name, with the plans and elevations that had settled by then.07“3D diagram — interlocking.” The word from SOOP’s three-part vision, drawn: volumes threaded into one another, with the tree and the parking noted at the section.08The tree again, in section, with the house arranged around what it will not move.
Options, and the form
Three scenarios set down to be compared and rejected, structure tested against perspective, and then the folded gable arrives in pencil — the profile the rest of the book keeps returning to.
09Scenario A, Scenario B, Scenario C. The options set down beside each other so they can be argued with.10Structure and perspective on one page — how the thing stands up, drawn beside how it will be seen.11The pool arrives as a circle, cut into the plan and held in the section above the rooms it sits on.12The folded gable studied straight on and in perspective, in pencil — the only tonal page in the set, and the profile the rest of the sketchbook keeps returning to.
Turning inward
The same book, later. With the outside settled the drawings move to room scale: cabinetry, openings, and the stair unrolled into the geometry someone would have to cut treads from.
13Inside, at the scale where a house stops being a diagram: cabinetry drawn as elevation after elevation.14Openings and their proportions, tested against the rooms they light.15The last of the interior sheets, with the circular geometry turning up again in the joinery.16The stair, in plan and unrolled. A circle again, and the geometry that had to resolve before anyone could cut treads for it.
The last sketchbook
Three pages, and the loosest marks are gone. Rooms are named and numbered, sections carry dimensions, and the gable finally opens into the arch the house is now known by.
17The programme arrives: rooms named and numbered in plan, a mezzanine pencilled at the back, the master marked.18The densest page in the set. Sections stacked and worked over until the levels, the deck and the double height resolve against one another.19And the gable opening into the arch: four studies across one page, with notes for solar panels, the property setback lines, and a 3D model to come.
The diagrams
October 2024, by her own filing. The house drawn five times, each version adding exactly one thing to the last — the tree, then the planting, then the pool, then the terrace. This is the argument at its most stripped, and this is the house that got built.
20The house reduced to a line drawing: the lot, the neighbours either side, and the volume stepped down the length of it. Nothing else on the page yet.21The tree goes in. One canopy at the back, and the drawing immediately has a thing it has to work around.22Then the rest of the planting, thickening along the boundary the house does not touch.23The pool arrives, and it is the first colour on any of these sheets — a blue disc cut into the roof.24And the last layer: the terrace green laid in beside the water. Five drawings, each adding one decision to the one before it.
The model
Printed and set on a board with the neighbours blocked out around it, then turned, and finally carried out and held up against the real street.
25Printed, and put down on a board with the neighbours blocked out around it. The folded roof reads at a glance in a way no drawing of it does.26Turned. The stepped volumes and the cut through the middle, from the side the street sees.27Turned again, into the rear. The mass opens where the garden is.28And held up against the site itself — the model in front, the real block behind, testing whether it belongs on the street it was drawn for.
And then it was built
June 2026. The same house, photographed. Read these against the diagrams two chapters up — the blue disc, the green terrace, the tree left standing — and they are the same drawing.
29The folded planes, standing. The same profile the pencil pages kept circling, now in white against the sky.30The blue disc from the fourth diagram, built: the pool set into the roof deck with the curved soffit closing over it.31Wider, and the terrace green from the fifth diagram is there too — laid in beside the water exactly where the drawing put it.32The covered walk down the flank, planting hard against the glass, the boundary the diagrams kept thickening.33Inside. A round skylight over the room, and the circle that ran through every sketchbook page arriving overhead.34And the length of it, looking out. Photographs by SOOP.35And the built answer to it. The covered walk on the upper floor, epoxy underfoot and frameless glass at the edge, looking the length of the house to the canopy the drawings kept calling the tree. Photograph by SOOP.
Before there was a studio
June 2019, and a different house. A hundred-and-one-page concept deck, made under her own name — SOOP would not exist for another year. None of what follows was built. It is here because the house above was argued into being against it, and because the questions are already the right ones: what the tree gets, where the water goes, how much street the building gives back.
36Programme before form. The section coloured by use — living and dining low, amenity between, bedrooms above — with the tree drawn in at its real size and the house arranged around it.37The programme mapped onto Option A — sleeping above, amenity through the middle, living and dining at the ground.38The same three bands against Option B. The order holds even where the roof does not.39Option 2's programme, drawn in solid colour rather than outline — the same bands, redistributed, with the tree standing in the middle of them.
Three shapes, and none of them this one
Options A, B and C, drawn against the same lot and the same tree. Every one of them folds; the house that got built curves. Every one of them holds the water in a rectangle; the house that got built cut a circle.
40An early mass study, before the options were named. The building still runs the length of the lot in one piece.41The same study broken up: the long block giving way to separate volumes with gaps between them, which is the move the finished house keeps.42Mass Option A. The volume broken into pieces and set back from the street, tested as a white model against the grey block either side.43Option A from above — gables over the pool court, the tree coming up through the middle of it.44Option A from the pavement, wedged between the neighbours, the gable end reading as one face.45Mass Option B. The same lot, the pieces pulled apart differently, the gap between them doing the work.46Option B set out on the lot: volumes at either end, water and paving held between them.47Option B from the other side, the pool running the length of the gap.48Mass Option C. Folded roofs, a court cut through the middle, and a long rectangle of water between the volumes. Set it against the diagrams further up the page: what got built curves where this folds, and the water became a circle.49Option C. The roofs fold, and the outline stops being a rectangle.50Option C closer in — two folded volumes facing each other across the tree.51Option C from the pavement, with a section cut through the neighbouring wall. This is the last drawing in the book.
