The Adriana Varejao Gallery is a space designed specifically to house the works of the artist, who participated in the conceptualization of architectural design. The gallery is located within the Inhotim institute for art in Brumadinho, Brazil.
The building was designed by architect Paulistano Cervino Rodrigo Lopez, a key feature to this building is that visitors are lead between two levels of the park and across a mirror positioned over a lake. This offers alternating moments of contraction/passage and expansion/exhibition: from the ground floor, in the middle of the water pond, in a narrow promenade, away from the building.
The project occupies a hillside with a small slope and is partially surrounded by native forest, an area formerly used to store containers. The original topography was modified for this use: a huge displacement of earth has cut it, creating the great horizontal plane for the storage. The orientation of the project aimed to recompose the site's original topography and inserting on it an artificial element: a regular block in reinforced concrete, partially inserted in the hillside. The building structure is composed by an irregular retaining wall that gains the space in the ground floor and receives the loads of the block, in its deepest part, trough two beams, in the middle, through 4 columns integrated in the wall.