david hotson & fiandre architectural surfaces reinterpret armenian church
david hotson collaborates with fiandre architectural surfaces for saint sarkis church
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, of Iris Ceramica Group, a striking façade dissolves 1.5 million unique pixels each representing the victims of the 1915 Armenian genocide.
David Hotson reinterprets 1,400 year-old Armenian prototype in the design of the Saint Sarkis Church in Texas
all images courtesy of Iris Ceramica Group
Architect David Hotson collaborates with Fiandre of Iris Ceramica Group to memorialize the victims of the Armenian Genocide. Working with long-time collaborator architect 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.
the most striking of these contemporary innovations is the west façade of the church
the 1.5 million pixels are generated by a computer script
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.
each of the 1.5 million pixels represents the individual victims of the 1915 Armenian genocide
fiandre’s design your slabs allows fine custom decoration
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.
