Texas church combines modern design with ancient traditions

Performing with extended-time collaborator Stepan Terzyan, New York architect David Hotson, AIA, created the new Saint Sarkis Armenian Church in Carrollton, Texas. Its layout combines Armenia’s historic architectural and artistic traditions with modern electronic style and fabrication technologies.

The church exterior, rendered in modern elements, references the monolithic sculptural character of ancient Armenian churches which were made totally of stone. The juxtaposition of the monochrome architecture versus the multicolored vegetation, envisioned and executed by landscape designer Zepur Ohanian, recreates the connection between monolithic architecture and verdant landscape, usual of ancient Armenian church buildings.

The total interior ground region for the complete complex is somewhere around 2973 m² (32,000 sf). Upon stepping into the church by the memorial facade, people arise into the sanctuary, a composition of light-stuffed spatial volumes modeled on the inside of the historical Armenian church, Saint Hripsime. Concave gentle coves sculpted into the exterior reflect sunlight indirectly, illuminating the interior area.

The doubly curved plaster vaults that shape the interior house had been fabricated in glass-fiber-strengthened gypsum instantly from the architect’s pc model. The interior vaults are easy and scaleless, with no seen lighting fixtures, air-conditioning registers, or other modern day technical specifics.

The church is heated and cooled with a displacement climate command technique which introduces conditioned air at minimal velocity by means of flooring registers situated under the pews. The outcome is a silent inside, without the need of any mechanical vibration or the ambient sound of a traditional high-velocity air-conditioning system.

The church celebrated its to start with Sunday company on April 24, 2022, the yearly day on which the international Armenian Diaspora memorializes the 1.5 million victims of the 1915 Armenian Genocide.