Beatriz Vélez do Campo

Beatriz Vélez do Campo, also known as Bea, is an architect determined to defend a vision of building that is smaller, more humane, and not confined to conventional displays of scale. When Ingrid dismisses the model for her treehouse, Beatriz first tries to win her over with a professional presentation; afterward, she turns the rejection into a resolve to build the project herself. A separate confrontation with Diego Ariza shows another, sharply angry side of her, though the evidence here does not explain what led to it.

The Model and the Pitch

Beatriz takes her architectural model to Ingrid’s studio in the town’s Plaza Mayor, carrying it in a large bag. The studio is an open, modern industrial space, with exposed air-conditioning pipes and broad windows looking onto the square and its Baroque church. The contrast between the church and the studio’s clean lines frames the architectural differences that Beatriz is trying to navigate.

While waiting for Ingrid, Beatriz sets the model on a table. When Ingrid arrives, she greets Beatriz with evident disappointment. Beatriz nevertheless presents the design at length: she explains the house’s intentions, the architectural movement that informed it, and whether such a structure could feasibly be built. She wants to impress Ingrid and hopes for an offer of work—not because she has already decided to accept, but because she wants to have that door open and be able to choose.

Beatriz knows she is not naturally good at selling her projects. She regards that as Víctor’s particular strength, but believes that, with effort, she can do at least half as well as her former partner. The model therefore serves two purposes: it is a proposal for a building and a test of whether she can advocate for her own work without relying on someone else’s salesmanship.

Rejection and Resolve

On the roughly two-kilometre walk home, Beatriz is angry with Ingrid, with her mother Ángela, and with herself for failing to defend either the model or her architectural vision. She rejects the implication that admiration for Ingrid’s work requires her to accept Ingrid’s standards as the only valid ones. In Beatriz’s view, architecture need not consist solely of immense projects—towering buildings or grand museums—and the pursuit of that scale has not prevented bankruptcy or produced only useful places.

She also challenges the gendered judgment behind treating a treehouse as childish or unserious. Beatriz refuses the expectation that her architecture must be as robust, solid, or phallic as a man’s in order to count as serious. She insists that the project is solid, while also arguing that even if it were considered feminine or childlike, that would not make it worthless. Her defence is not a claim that every large building is bad: she acknowledges that Ingrid’s work and other architects’ projects have created both wonderful places and ugly, useless ones. The point is that no single architectural approach should be treated as the only legitimate one.

At home, Beatriz tells her family what she has decided: she will build her treehouse, using the model as a basis but improving it. Ángela asks whether Ingrid has commissioned it. The question underscores the distinction Beatriz is making: the decision is hers, not an assignment granted by the architect who criticized her. She does not need an award to validate the undertaking; she wants to demonstrate that a smaller, more human kind of architecture can stand alongside other visions.

Confrontation with Diego Ariza

In a separate scene, Beatriz takes a telephone from an excessively made-up woman and addresses Diego Ariza directly. She identifies herself as the person whose life he has just ruined, orders him to come down, and hangs up. The gesture is immediate and furious; the woman watching her is frightened. The scene establishes the force of Beatriz’s accusation and her willingness to confront Diego, but does not, by itself, disclose the circumstances behind it.

Character and Architectural Conviction

These scenes place Beatriz’s professional ambition beside her resistance to being diminished. She wants access to architectural work and makes a deliberate effort to present her ideas persuasively, yet she does not accept that professional recognition should require surrendering the project’s unconventional scale or character. Ingrid’s response wounds her partly because Beatriz has admired Ingrid’s work, but that admiration does not erase her right to disagree.

The treehouse becomes the concrete expression of that disagreement: first a model she carries into a studio, then a project she chooses to pursue without waiting for Ingrid’s approval. Beatriz’s resolve turns a failed pitch into an independent undertaking, while her confrontation with Diego reveals a more volatile conflict whose full context remains outside these scenes.