“A Gentle Pedagogy": Oral Archive of Julia Van Wilpe's Legacy in Costa Rica

Abstract

In 2025, the authors of this study conducted an interview with architect Gloria González García with the aim of examining the trajectory of architect Julia van Wilpe and her teaching practice at Universidad Autónoma de Centroamérica (UACA). This article is based on that interview, in which González García recounts her experience as a former student of van Wilpe in the late 1970s. In this sense, the interview is conceived as a methodological strategy to begin systematizing and analyzing van Wilpe’s academic and professional legacy in Costa Rica. Through a semi-structured interview organized into five thematic sections and addressed through four analytical categories, the study recovers narratives that allow for the examination of her modes of teaching, her contributions to architectural discourses on climate and environment, the tensions derived from her gendered condition, and her recognition within the disciplinary field. The conversation activates affective memories, methodological references, and technical knowledge that rarely appear in institutional archives, positioning the interview both as a means of historical-disciplinary inquiry and as an oral mechanism for the documentation and circulation of marginalized architectural narratives. The findings identify in van Wilpe a form of “soft” pedagogy oriented toward autonomous thinking, a situated understanding of the tropical environment, and an ethical and coherent professional trajectory. It is concluded that this methodological approach expands the ways in which disciplinary archives may be constructed and proposes new lines of inquiry focused on situated knowledge and non-canonical architectural practices.