New meets old as award-winning New York architect David Hotson reinterprets 1,400 year-old armenian prototype for the Saint Sarkis Church in Carrollton, Texas. The 2022 addition looks forward as well as backward, marrying ancient architectural and artistic traditions with contemporary digitally-driven design and fabricating technologies, evident more profoundly on the western side. In collaboration with Italian Architectural Surfaces manufacturer Fiandre, part of Iris Ceramica Group, a striking façade dissolves 1.5 million unique pixels each representing the victims of the 1915 Armenian genocide.
Architect David Hotson collaborates with Fiandre part of Iris Ceramica Group to memorialize the victims of the Armenian Genocide. Working with long-time collaborator Stepan Terzyan, Hotson modeled the design on the ancient church of Saint Hripsime (618 AD), which still stands near Armenia’s modern capital of Yerevan. Saint Sarkis was laid exactly fourteen centuries later in 2018, and its connection to the ancient prototype provides a link to Armenia’s legacy as the world’s first Christian nation.
It goes without saying that the most striking of these contemporary innovations is the west façade of the church, composed of interwoven botanical motifs drawn from Armenian art. As a visitor approaches, 1.5 million tiny pixels begin to dissolve. All were generated by a computer script that makes each one unique accurately representing the individuals who perished in the country’s genocide in 1915, including family members of the Saint Sarkis congregation as well. The individual icons spreading across the entire surface provides a visceral encounter with the scale of the historical atrocity, essentially serving as a subtle but powerful memorial.
To implement the façade, David Hotson partnered closely with Fiandre. The manufacturing brand’s Design Your Slabs system allows exterior grade, UV-resistant custom printing at extremely fine resolution on large-format porcelain rain screen panel materials. The Italian-fabricated façade is the first use of this exterior grade high-resolution digital printing technology to optically engage the viewer in a series of visual scales nested inside each other. Graniti Vicentia Façades installed and utilized the proprietary ventilated system of Granitech – the division of Iris Ceramica Group dedicated to Ventilated Façade Systems.
In addition to the memorial façade, Fiandre supplied the full range of porcelain interior and exterior floor, wall and soffit finishes used throughout the Saint Sarkis Campus. The solid gray mass of the church exterior, rendered in modern materials, references the monolithic sculptural character of ancient Armenian churches which were constructed entirely of stone. The juxtaposition of the monochrome architecture against the rich multicolored vegetation, envisioned and implemented by landscape designer Zepur Ohanian, recreates the powerful relationship between monolithic architecture and verdant landscape that is typical of the ancient churches and monastery complexes that still survive throughout the Armenian homeland.
project info:
name: Saint Sarkis Armenian Church
ceramics: Fiandre Architectural Surfaces + DYS (Iris Ceramica Group)/@fiandre_surfaces
architect: David Hotson /@davidhotson_architect
ventilated façade: Granitech /@granitech_official
installation: Graniti Vicentia Façade
location: Carrollton, Texas, USA
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