Yacademy Podcast: How It All Starts - The Idea of Our Students Serena and Leah
Yacademy has launched a new project based on the initiative of two of our former students: Serena L'Assainato from the Architecture for Landscape course and Leah Hoepelman from the Architecture for Common Spaces course.
The first episodes of our podcast are now available on Spotify. Here is how everything came to life!
The Podcast in Serena and Leah's own words
Have you ever felt inspired by someone and wondered, “How did they get there?”, or even, in moments of doubt, caught yourself thinking, “I’ll never reach that level”? For many young architects, the profession often feels like an arena - competitive, demanding, and relentless. Finding a place where one’s creativity is not only welcomed but sustained can become an overwhelming - and sometimes disheartening - pursuit.
We look up to emerging talents who seem to rise effortlessly, as if they have already secured their place in the architectural world. But the questions linger: How did they truly get where they are? Is it a matter of talent, discipline, or is there something deeper at play—a mindset, a chain of choices, a hidden narrative we rarely see from the outside?
How Common Feelings Became a Podcast
The idea began between classes at Yacademy. Serena and Leah, two young architects from different backgrounds, found themselves in a profound conversation where they realized that, even with distinct paths, ambitions, and dreams, they were both struck by a shared feeling: the overwhelming doubt and fear that so often looms over a creative career.
As they shared their own frustrations, an important realization emerged. While the students at Yacademy spent their days learning from extraordinary architects around the world - celebrating their iconic works and the trajectories that led them there - something was missing, something essential felt absent. They admired the projects, the achievements, the global recognition. But they also wondered: Where was the human story?
The Process: Designing a Space for Honesty
Like any architectural project, the podcast began with a clear concept. Its goal: to offer architecture enthusiasts something too rarely discussed - hope, honesty, and personal insights into universal themes such as insecurity, fear of failure, and the pressure to measure up.
The intention wasn’t simply to create another form of media content, but to actually create a space where the architects visiting Yacademy could be seen beyond their portfolios. Serena and Leah wanted to ask the questions that almost never make it onto lecture slides:
How do you actually get there? What doubts did you face along the way? What challenges shaped you—not as an architect, but as a person?
This duo recognized the value in learning from renowned firms, from award-winning projects, and from decades of experience. Yet they also sensed that students - including themselves, craved something more vulnerable and, most of all, relatable. The true insights into the internal processes, struggles, and moments of uncertainty that define a creative life.
The Execution: Bringing the Project to Life
At the heart of the podcast lies a simple ambition: to make the guests of these conversations feel approachable. Young architects across the world know the major names and the iconic firms, yet often find it nearly impossible to relate to them. They study their buildings, but rarely meet the person behind them. That distance creates the illusion that success is linear, effortless, or predetermined—an illusion both Serena and Leah had also been victims of.
To bridge that gap, the podcast intentionally invited guests closer to their own stage in the journey—architects who might not have thirty years of experience, but who had already carved a meaningful path in the field. Architects who were still close enough to remember the struggle, the uncertainty, and the hunger to grow. It aligned seamlessly with the spirit of YACademy: a place where young creatives are encouraged to experiment, challenge conventions, and shape their own identity within the discipline.
The Result: Giving Meaning
Far more than a podcast, this project represents an open door—a softer, and more human way of learning architecture. It brings to the forefront the overlooked fact that behind impactful design, there are individuals who have navigated fear, ambition, insecurity, failure, and reinvention.
Great architecture is indeed built by great people. But those people are not untouchable. They are not distant. They are often just like us.
The diversity of voices and personalities featured in the episodes offers rare insight into the multitude of paths within the profession. These conversations bring forward themes of collaboration, boldness, experimentation, and the transformative power of networking.
One thing is clear though, these conversations are not meant to provide a blueprint for success. Instead, these stories provide something just as valuable: the feeling of
being seen, understood, and accompanied in a field where doubt is often silent yet universal. And aligning with YACademy’s commitment to networking and knowledge-sharing, the podcast becomes a platform where students and young professionals can engage in meaningful dialogue—amplifying a shared belief that, with the right connections and vision, anything is possible.
The Collective Vision Beyond
In the end, this was never meant to belong solely to Serena and Leah. The podcast was created by YACademy students and for YACademy students. Which is why, their wish is that future cohorts will continue the project, shaping it with their own questions, conversations, and evolving perspectives. Each generation brings new doubts, new ambitions, new challenges—and with them, new stories worth telling.
This is not be seen as a finished project, but a living one: a collective archive of voices, viewpoints, and experiences that grows with each group that passes. It is an invitation for others to take the microphone and widen the conversation with the mission to continue revealing that human side of architecture.
It was never meant to be just by us, but by all of us—because the journey is shared, the questions are shared, and the humanity behind architecture also deserves a place at the table.
01. The bold approach, from studying to practice | A conversation with Andrea Bulloni (LAND)
02. The overlooked topic of collaboration | A conversation with Monica Gaspar Bonilla (Herzog & de Meuron)
03. Between Legacy and Intuition | A conversation with Roberto Cremascoli and Camilla Donantoni (COR arquitectos) (Translation below)
04. Architecture in extreme environments | A conversation with Francesco Axel Romio (Yacademy alumnus)
05. Beyond sustainability, where design meets purpose | A conversation with Martina Maier (Snøhetta)
Translation of Roberto Cremascoli's interventions
00:01:09:14
So, we met at IUAV in Venice during a very important Summer School called Wave, which has now reached its 25th edition. COR Arquitectos have taken part in the Summer School four times. In the context of a jury to which I was invited, architect Donatoni was participating in that edition of Wave, which is a competition held within the university. I was immediately struck by the project presented by her group because it dealt with an archaeological area, Villa Adriana in Tivoli, and, as you mentioned, part of COR Arquitectos’ work focuses on the graphic and archaeological museum. Our studio therefore invited her straight away to collaborate on the current Architecture Biennale taking place in Venice.
We worked together in the Holy See Pavilion – the Policy Pavilion – at the most recent Venice Biennale, and that is how our collaboration began. Now I will not list all the projects on which architect Donatoni is project manager within the studio.
00:07:41:01
I have known Álvaro Siza for 34 years. I went to Porto many years ago to study with him, to graduate under his supervision, and to work with him for many years. I was fortunate enough to travel extensively with him, and through all those journeys I understood one thing: to do our job you need a great deal of patience and, above all, curiosity. Through curiosity we always retain the desire to learn, and he, at 92, is still curious like a child.
00:08:45:13
My thesis was a project for the new municipal library of Milan, and there was a programme at the Politecnico di Milano that envisaged four theses on the same site, fairly central in Milan, on Via della Moscova. There was this last wartime remnant from the Second World War, so there was an open space available. There were four theses: one with Giorgio Grassi, one with Álvaro Siza, one with Eduardo Souto de Moura, and one with the great Umberto Riva, who passed away a couple of years ago. Incidentally, when I was young I worked in the studio with Umberto Oliva.
In short, there were these four theses, these four libraries, and I did the one with Álvaro Siza. Pier Luigi Nicolin sent me to Porto to do this thesis. It is very amusing – one day we will probably make a small book or a lecture about it – because the four projects are very different yet very similar in their approach. In short, they are four contextualists, as I like to define them.
00:17:32:17
There is a text he wrote about my thesis work in which he says “hand-to-hand combat”: “architecture is like a hand-to-hand struggle”. It requires opposition, it requires a set of discordances, it requires conflict.
00:19:30:00
There is a democratic dimension, because in Siza’s projects there is never a hierarchy of spaces. Obviously there always is, but the spaces are like people who, in short… the human being is born equal and should always be equal among others. When I say this with regard to spaces, what I mean is that for Siza, when designing a technical space where the electrical panel is, where the technical equipment is located, he puts in the same level of commitment as when he designs the auditorium of that same building. That is why there is no hierarchy.
It is important, for example, that he says when you arrive in a place the business card is the parking, the garage. All spaces must be treated with care.
00:21:51:03
I believe that the best artefacts, the best projects, the best things – and not only in architecture – work when there is joy. Joy is also a by-product of the conditions that people, or my collaborators, have in the studio. In our studio there has never been anyone who was unpaid, or who did not receive bonuses – this is important – or who could not ask me for an extra day, one day less, and then make it up later. These are small but fundamental actions to create a family-like environment and therefore genuine collaboration. And then, when it is time to suffer, to endure pain together, issues get resolved. I know that Camilla, with regard to this, thinks I am too much of a trade unionist.
00:24:00:14
Yes, I am now almost 300 years old, and all my collaborators always seem a bit like my children to me.
00:24:32:12
As Camilla was saying, the goal she achieves is learning from the students. I really like learning from people who are younger than me, and Camilla is very similar to me. That is why I fell in love with her way of working, because we are very similar: in patience and in making people we meet feel at ease.
In the sense that we like people to feel good: clients, students. I really enjoy being with students, even though I cannot spend much time with them. Over the last year, year and a half, I have appreciated seeing Camilla’s abilities – you saw them this morning – in managing, for example, 60 or 70 students at a time, and she does so with a passion that in Italian we call “squeezing blood from a stone”. This means a great deal, because she then transmits all this energy to the studio and to the work she does, and in fact we are giving her a great deal of responsibility in this regard.