David Hotson (b. 1959) founded his New York City-based practice David Hotson Architect in 1991. His projects – houses, loft residences, penthouse apartments, and galleries – are known for their remarkable spatial and visual complexity. His Church of Saint Sarkis in Carrollton, Texas is especially distinguished for the luminous and sculptural qualities of its interior space as well as the exterior grade high-resolution digital printing on its west façade. Earlier this year this appealing work won the US Building of the Year award by World-Architects.com. Hotson obtained his Bachelor of Environmental Design from the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada, and earned his Master of Architecture in 1987 at Yale.
In the following interview with David Hotson, we discussed the architect’s design process, focusing on making concave spatial voids legible and primary, being inspired by Byzantine architecture and his favorite building ever built, what structure he considers the most important work of contemporary architecture, what makes his award-winning Church of Saint Sarkis special, and the use of space and light as the essential tools in creating architecture as a figural void and ultimately an art form.
Vladimir Belogolovsky: Could you touch on your design process? How do you typically start a project?
David Hotson: We develop every detail of a project in terms of the delineation of a composition of intersecting voids. I have learned to see intersecting volumes in a plan. These quickly expand into three-dimensional sketches developed in dialogue with a computer model, exploring the volumetric composition from the inside, focusing on thresholds of entrance and the primary path of movement, resolving every intersection so that the concave spatial voids, rather than convex material masses, are legible and primary. I enjoy this process immensely.
VB: Would you name any primary sources of your inspiration?
DH: I think the architect whose approach to space as a primary medium of design comes closest to where I am trying to go is Alvaro Siza. His work has been my inspiration since I first saw it. Then there is Byzantine architecture, with complex immersive centralized plans and the purity of spatial volume that is not invaded by advancing sculptural ornament or scenographic perspectival effects, as predominate in the axial churches of the west. In my view, Hagia Sophia is the greatest building ever built, a paradigm of the approach to architecture as interior space. Together with the acoustics, the scent of incense, and the movement of light, the space provides an experience of being transported from the exterior world of the objective, material, figural objects to the interior realm of the experiential, subjective, immaterial figural void. That purity of volumetric delineation of that space has had a big impact on me.
VB: Let’s talk about Saint Sarkis Armenian Orthodox Church in Carrollton, Texas. This project is fundamentally a traditional building. Yet, it is resolutely innovative, particularly its west façade, which is printed with an Armenian cross that upon close inspection is revealed to be made up of 1.5 million unique pixels. The pattern serves as a monument to the 1.5 million victims of the 1915 Armenian genocide. Could you touch on this project’s design?
DH: Yes, the project was restricted formally. We began with the model of the ancient Armenian church of Saint Hripsime in Yerevan, considered a masterpiece of Armenian architecture that is on the UNESCO World Heritage list. Armenia is the world’s oldest Christian nation, having adopted Christianity as a state religion in 301AD, 80 years before the Roman Empire converted to Christianity. The church of Saint Hripsime was completed in 618AD and the cornerstone for the Saint Sarkis church was laid in 2018, exactly 1,400 years later. The exterior form and interior space of Saint Sarkis reflect a deep respect for this ancient tradition. Nevertheless, in building a church for a modern Armenian community, standing on a slight hill overlooking the vast Texas horizon, remembering a space separated by 14 centuries and eight thousand miles, it was important that the building gestures to the present and the future as well as the past.
In its long history in a contested area of the South Caucasus between Russia/the USSR, Persia/Iran, the Byzantine and Ottoman Empires, the Armenian people have endured centuries of upheaval, the most horrific of which was the Armenian genocide of 1915 as the Ottoman Empire was collapsing during World War 1. The pixels you mentioned were derived from the infinitely varied circular emblems that reoccur throughout the Armenian artistic tradition. The façade is covered with 1.5 million of them, each one representing one of the 1.5 unique individuals who perished in the genocide. The façade was implemented by using exterior grade high-resolution digital printing on porcelain rain-screen panels to optically engage the viewer in a series of visual scales nested inside each other. The overall façade depicts the figure of the distinctive Armenian cross, a symbol of suffering, forgiveness, redemption, and rebirth. On approach, the cross is seen to be composed of interwoven geometrical and botanical motifs derived from the Armenian artistic tradition, symbolizing the shared language, faith, and history that have bound the Armenian community together through thousands of years of crisis. And on still closer approach these interwoven figures dissolve into a grid of tiny circular ornaments, each 1 cm in diameter. Our office developed a computer script to generate a total of 1.5 million unique ornaments and distribute them across the façade according to density to form large-scale figures. Like snowflakes each pixel is unique, and each represents one of the 1.5 million individuals who perished in the genocide.
VB: The building’s interior is quite special and visually very different from what the exterior may suggest.
DH: Absolutely. The interior is smoothly crafted into a seemingly weightless figure of intersecting spatial volumes, suspended over the congregation as a luminous memory of the original ancient space of the Hripsime church. The powerful Texas sunlight is reflected into the interior through a series of concealed openings resulting in an ethereal quality of illumination. The interior surfaces are constructed from doubly-curved glass-fiber-reinforced gypsum panels generated directly from our computer models and seamed together on site. We eliminated all visible light fixtures, sprinkler heads, air conditioning registers, and so on. The result was this sort of scaleless luminous vessel, simultaneously familiar and otherworldly. Working with voids shaped from this material and filled with indirect light has been transformative and is informing new commissions in which we are developing similar ways of working with indirect natural light but freed from the restrictions of a historical model. We are just beginning to explore the possibilities of this way of shaping space.
VB: What one building built in America since 2000 would you name as the most important work of contemporary architecture?
DH: It is a place I haven’t visited, and it is a place, which is not finished yet. It is Roden Crater by James Turrell. I see it as the most important work of contemporary architecture. For one, it is a purely spatial conception carved into the earth, with no exterior façade at all. And two—it is about space that interacts with a point of view as the visitor moves through it. It is an intensely experiential space, suspended within a series of intersecting voids under a volcano crater with unique perspectival vistas and distortions, optical figures that appear within the vision and then distort as you move through it. Turrell is using space and light as an art form, in a way that very few architects attempt to do. He has ventured into the vast unexploited artistic medium that is a unique domain of architecture which is the figural void, the delineated figure of architectural space.
