SORA (KŪ) VERSAILLES
Printed Architectural Mesh
1596 x 1236 x 1236 in (4053.84 x 3139.44 x 3139.44 cm)
2018
Location: The Versailles Building, Miami Beach, FL | Commissioned by Faena Art
Photo Credit: Faena Art & Kerry McLaney
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Miya Ando’s Sora Versailles was a monumental, site-specific installation commissioned for the inaugural Faena Festival in Miami Beach, titled This Is Not America. The work transformed the exterior of the historic Versailles Hotel by wrapping it in a translucent scrim printed with photographs of the Miami sky. Clouds, captured by Ando in soft, tonal gradients, drifted across sheer fabric panels that cloaked the building’s façade, dissolving its solidity into a veil of atmosphere and light. The title, Sora Versailles, merges the Japanese word sora (空)—meaning “sky” or “emptiness”—with the name of the hotel, creating a dialogue between natural impermanence and architectural grandeur. By covering the hotel in sky, Ando effectively camouflaged it against its surroundings, dematerializing the building and rendering it a hovering apparition—no longer a monument to permanence, but a mirage suspended in light.
By transforming the hotel into a skybound apparition, Ando enacted a quiet inversion of monumentality. This act of atmospheric concealment reframed the hotel’s presence in the urban landscape—not as an erasure, but as a transformation. The building no longer functioned as a static symbol of history and power but became a surface for perception, weather, and time. Sora Versailles belongs to a lineage of contemporary installation practices that emphasize impermanence, light, and spatial affect. Rather than opposing architectural monumentality, Ando veiled it—softening its contours, making it reflective and transient. The result was a momentary architecture of breath and sky, offering a contemplative rupture in a landscape often shaped by assertion and spectacle.