Aguirre Arquitetura Splits a Yoga Studio in Uberlândia into Steel Pavilions Threaded with Gardens

Premavati has taught yoga in Uberlândia, Minas Gerais, for more than fifteen years. Its old home was a timber-framed building surrounded by nature, and the school wanted to keep that feeling when it moved into the Morada da Colina neighborhood. The brief for Aguirre Arquitetura was therefore less about size than about atmosphere. Lead architect Alexandre Aguirre, working with Mateus Finotti and Michell Damascena, had to bring a rural quiet onto an urban lot. The finished headquarters, completed in 2017, covers 419 m².

The interesting move is that the architects pulled the building apart. Most studios of this type put everything under one roof. Here reception, recreation, veranda, classrooms and administration are sorted into separate blocks, spaced apart and tied together by a long gallery. The gaps between the blocks are gardens. Nobody can step from one function to the next without passing through vegetation. The program becomes a sequence of pauses, which suits a building made for slowing down.

Low Pavilions That Defer to the Garden

At dusk the blocks read as lanterns set low in the landscape. The flat, dark roofs keep the profile close to the ground, and the deep overhangs lined in timber turn the eaves into the warmest surface on the exterior. Glass fills nearly everything below the roofline, so the pavilions look less like enclosures than like covered clearings.

The steel frame is painted brown rather than left grey or white. It is a small decision, but it matters. The structure sits in the same tonal range as the wood ceilings and the tree trunks, and it lets the multi-stemmed trees, rather than the building, set the rhythm of the elevation.

The Gallery and the Courtyards Between

The circulation spine does the real organizing work. It runs the length of the plan beneath a continuous timber soffit, with slender steel columns marking a steady beat past the planted courts. Rust-toned lettering on the walls echoes the corten in the doors and gives the gallery a quiet identity without a lot of signage.

The courtyards are not leftover space. One holds a water basin with a carved stone Ganesha resting on pebbles. Another, in the open lawn, carries an octagonal stone mosaic in a flower-of-life pattern. These are the spiritual set pieces of the project, and you encounter them while moving between rooms rather than staring at them from a single room. Maria Julia Bueno's planting of tropical species and fruit trees fills the remaining gaps and keeps every interior framed in green.

Practice Rooms Open to the Slope

The studio interiors are deliberately plain: a slatted timber ceiling, track lighting, a ceiling fan, rope fixtures on the wall for supported postures, and a burnished cement floor. The glazing does the rest. Students face a grassy bank instead of a mirror wall, so the outdoors becomes the focal point of the room.

The risk with this much glass is exposure, both to sun and to view. In the late afternoon photographs the sliding panels reflect the class back onto the walkway, a reminder that privacy here depends on the garden buffer and the time of day. The sustainability and energy efficiency claims attached to the project would be more convincing with published detail on shading and ventilation. What we can see is that the overhangs are generous and the glass slides fully open, which points to a building that relies on cross-breezes for much of the year.

Support Spaces at the Same Pace

Vanessa Tannus's interiors carry the same vocabulary into the smaller rooms. The office is a wooden desk and bentwood chairs facing a gridded glass wall onto a courtyard. The café pairs a concrete counter with wooden stools, and the light raking across the wall lands on Premavati's heart logo. Ceramic pots sit beneath a simple timber shelf against bare concrete.

None of this tries to compete with the practice rooms, and that restraint is right. The administration and the café sit within the same garden logic as the halls, so the staff and casual visitors get the same daylight and views as the students. In many yoga studios the support spaces get the worst of the plan. Here they get a fair share.

Plans and Drawings

The site plan shows the single-storey building wrapping into an L around the lawn, with the circular mosaic patio held in the open ground and parking pushed to the edge. The elevation and section confirm how low the scheme stays: one level, a gently sloped roof, water tanks set on top, and a stepped grade at one end where the building meets the slope. Pre-assembled steel made this a dry, fast build, and the drawings suggest a kit of repeated bays that could be maintained or adjusted without heavy work.

Why This Project Matters

Premavati Yoga Space offers a useful answer to a common problem: how to make a calm building on an ordinary city lot. Aguirre Arquitetura did not rely on a dramatic form or a single signature material. The calm comes from the plan itself. Splitting the program into blocks and putting gardens between them buys back views, light and moments of transition that a compact box would give up.

There are open questions. The extensive glazing needs climate data to back up the efficiency claims, and the spread-out plan trades floor efficiency for experience. For a client whose product is attention and stillness, we think that trade is the correct one. Smaller wellness and community buildings across Brazil's interior cities could learn from it: a modest steel frame, a disciplined palette, and a plan where you always walk through the garden.

Premavati Yoga Space by Aguirre Arquitetura (Alexandre Aguirre, Mateus Finotti, Michell Damascena), Uberlândia, Minas Gerais, Brazil. 419 m², completed 2017. Interiors by Vanessa Tannus, landscape by Maria Julia Bueno, lighting by Alexandre Aguirre and Fernando Aurélio Barros. Photography by Leonardo Finotti.

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