The private elevator landing opens into a tall vestibule, tapering upward to a seamless rectangular oculus which provides a view of the sculpted summit of the adjacent skyscraper.
From the elevator vestibule, the floor slopes gently upward, passing under the twisting shaft of the stairwell to arrive at the main level of the penthouse.
The stairwell shaft ascends through the full height of the penthouse, visually linking the entry hall with the structural glass floor of the attic four stories above.
The stair itself wraps around the stairwell. The facetted surfaces of the stairwell converge on apertures, trimmed in mirror polished stainless steel, which provide views into and through the stairwell from the surrounding spaces.
At the third level a structural glass bridge traverses the stairwell shaft passing through stainless-trimmed openings at either end.
The original riveted steel structure –clad in intumescent paint- threads through the faceted stairwell slipping through apertures into adjacent rooms.
For more on this project see the following links:
skyhouse / chapter 2_the slide
skyhouse / chapter 3_the living room
skyhouse / chapter 4_the north bedroom
skyhouse / chapter 5_the center bedroom
Two additional stories were added to a rare Queen-Anne townhouse under a raked roofline that keeps them invisible from street level. A new staircase, conceived as a continuously transforming sculptural element traversing eight stories from cellar spa to rooftop studio, forms the core of the house.
In 2019, David Hotson_Architect was retained by developer Alchemy Properties to provide an alternate vision for the six-story-tall raw shell of the Pinnacle Penthouse, situated at the summit of the landmarked 1913 Woolworth Building in Lower Manhattan. This vision involved adding an additional floor to enhance to experiential drama of arrival and add the encircling terrace to the penthouse property. This modified configuration ultimately led to the sale of this extraordinary property in 2023. David Hotson_Architect is now working with the purchaser of the Pinnacle to develop an architectural design that fully exploits the spatial and experiential opportunities of this utterly unique residence.
The Saint Sarkis Community Center consists of a three-building campus on five acres in Carrolton Texas that is the new home of the Saint Sarkis Armenian Church.
The centerpiece of the campus is the 250-seat church, which is approached through a shaded entry courtyard positioned between buildings that house an athletic facility and a community center building containing clerical offices, Sunday school classrooms, a reception hall and a 400-person event hall.
The gently sloping floor of the courtyard brings visitors past a reflecting pool set beneath an oculus that frames a view of the dome of the church beyond. During the hot summer months, breezes channeled through the shaded courtyard and across the reflecting pool will provide evaporative cooling to visitors entering the green compound that surrounds the church.
The building complex is clad in a uniform monochrome gray, achieved by matching the precast concrete exterior walls, with porcelain soffit and paving tiles, glass fiber reinforced concrete light coves, and standing seam zinc roofing. The solid gray mass of the church references the monolithic sculptural character of ancient Armenian churches, which were constructed entirely of stone.
The monochrome architecture is set off against the rich multicolored vegetation, evoking 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.
The site is situated on a slight rise looking west across the vast flat Texas plain with a border of magnolia and cypress trees which will rise just above horizon, creating a private compound with the enormous sky descending to the encircling green border. From the entry to the church the campus grounds slope gently to an outdoor stage situated at the western edge of the site. Raking west light at sunset transforms the campus every evening.
The 400-seat event hall looks south into the landscaped quadrangle and west to the horizon.
A description of the memorial façade and the sanctuary of the Saint Sarkis Church Campus can be found by following these links.
The Church of Saint Sarkis in Carrollton, Texas is modeled on the ancient church of Saint Hripsime which still stands 8,000 miles to the east near the ancient seat of the Armenian Apostolic Church in Etchmiadzin, within the modern-day Republic of Armenia, The Church of Saint Hripsime, was completed in 618 AD, and the cornerstone of Saint Sarkis was laid exactly fourteen centuries later in 2018.
The Armenian homeland, situated in the South Caucasus, originally encircled Mount Ararat, the tallest mountain in the Middle East where Noah’s ark is said to have come to rest at the end of the Biblical flood. In 301AD the Kingdom of Armenia became the first nation on earth to convert to Christianity, adopting the Christian faith sixty years before the Emperor Constantine established it as the official religion of the Roman Empire. The Church of Saint Hripsime has stood in this seismically active region sheltering Armenian congregations through fourteen centuries as the surrounding Persian, Greek, Roman, Byzantine, Ottoman, Russian and Soviet Empires rose and fell. It serves as s symbol of the continuity and perseverance of the language, faith and traditions of the Armenian people.
The Saint Sarkis church, carrying the memory of this ancient tradition, faces west, overlooking the vast Texas horizon, remembering the distant Armenian homeland from which the ancestors of many members of the congregation were violently expelled during the Armenian genocide of 1915. Millions were driven into the Syrian desert, where they perished of thirst, starvation, exhaustion and exposure. A few survived the desert crossing and reached Lebanon, where an Armenian diaspora community was established. The primary patron of the new Saint Sarkis Church was born in Beirut and emigrated to America during the Lebanese Civil War. An Armenian diaspora community formed north of Dallas and eventually established the first home for the Saint Sarkis congregation in a converted house purchased in 1990. The Saint Sarkis Church campus is the new home for this original congregation.
Upon stepping through the western façade, which serves as a memorial to the 1.5 million victims of the Genocide, the visitor emerges into the sanctuary, a volumetric composition modeled on the interior of Saint Hripsime. Concave light coves sculpted into the exterior reflect the powerful Texas sunlight indirectly into the interior. The surfaces of the concave spatial volumes, fabricated in glass-fiber-reinforced gypsum, are smooth and scaleless, with no visible lighting fixtures, air-conditioning registers or other contemporary technical details to interrupt the luminous spatial figure. The result is a figure of architectural space filled with an ethereal quality of light, in which Illumination reaches the congregation through the weightless memory of the ancient church of Saint Hripsime suspended over the sanctuary.
The church is heated and cooled with a displacement climate control system, which uses a remotely located mechanical plant to introduce conditioned air at low velocity through floor registers located under the pews. The result is a silent interior, free of the mechanical vibration or ambient noise of a conventional high velocity air conditioning system, offering a silent backdrop for the reverberant acoustics of traditional Armenian choral music.
A description of the memorial façade of the Saint Sarkis Church and the architecture of the Saint Sarkis Church Campus can be found by following these links.
The western facade at the entrance to the Church of Saint Sarkis serves as a memorial to the victims of the 1915 Armenian Genocide.
From a distance the facade depicts the traditional Armenian cross with the distinctive branching arms.
As a visitor approaches the façade, the cross dissolves into patterns of interwoven botanical and geometrical strands drawn from medieval Armenian art, evoking the threads of ancestry, language, culture and tradition that have bound the Armenian people together through centuries of upheaval.
Upon approaching still closer, these interwoven ornamental patterns dissolve further, into a grid tiny circular ornaments, each one centimeter in diameter. The ornaments are derived from the endlessly varied circular emblems, symbolizing infinity, that recur throughout the Armenian artistic tradition. There are 1.5 million ornaments in total spreading across the entire facade, and every one is unique, each representing one of the 1.5million individuals who perished in the 1915 Armenian Genocide.
The scale of the individual icons spreading across the entire façade provides an encounter with the scale of this historical loss.
The graphic design was developed in the office and a the computer script was written to generate 1.5 million unique ornaments and distribute them by density to form the overall design. The facade was manufactured by Fiandre, the Italian manufacturer of porcelain finishes who developed a groundbreaking process of high-resolution uv-resistant printing on exterior-grade porcelain rain-screen panels and worked through the global pandemic to fabricate and print this memorial to the ancestors of congregation of the Saint Sarkis Church.
The church of Saint Sarkis was consecrated on April 23rd, 2022, and the first service was celebrated the following day, on Sunday April 24th, the date every year dedicated to the memory of the victims of the Armenian Genocide.
In November 2022, the Saint Sarkis memorial facade was honored with a Best of Year Award by the editors of Interior Design Magazine.
A description of the architecture of the sanctuary of the Saint Sarkis Church and the surrounding campus can be found by following these links.
The entrance to a tubular slide, constructed from mirror-polished stainless steel, emerges through a circular hole cut in the seamless sloping glass partition at the south end of the Attic.
The cylindrical helical slide flares to an ellipse which is sectioned on the angle of the inclined glass wallresulting in a circular opening where the slide emerges through the glass. This circular opening creates an illusion of flatness contradicted by the sideways path of the slide as it begins its descent.
Visitors are invited to select a yellow cashmere blanket from the pile beside the entrance to speed their trip to the bottom….
The first leg of the slide passes through the attic glass, coils around the column and over the double-height guest bedroom, then slips through a second seamless glass window and out over the stair.
Windows in the slide admit natural light from the dormer windows and provide a fleeting vistas through the entire length of the penthouse.
To compete with the drama of the slide as it sweeps through the space and out the window to the stair, interior designer Ghislaine Vinas installed a startling mural, inspired by Michael Jackson’s Neverland, in the only vertical wall in the room. The saturated colors of the mural are fractured in the mirror polished facets of the slide, scatting patterns of color along the inner surface of the slide.
At the bedroom entrance a landing provides an opportunity to make a local stop at the third level or to re-enter the slide to continue down to the entrance level.
The lower slide coils down through the ceiling and into the Library on the main level, suspended from a single point within the floor structure above.
As it reaches the end, the helical slide tube flares out to create a distorted rectangular mirror which forms the wall of the Library and deposits the intrepid visitor back in the Entrance Gallery at the foot of the staircase.
For more on this project see the following links:
This six-bedroom villa on the beach in Saint Barthelemy was designed to reflect the tradition of single-story buildings with hipped rooflines that predominate on this Caribbean island. The villa is composed of five pavilions clustered around a sand-filled courtyard that extends in from the beach. Each of the pavilions is unique; the four smaller pavilions each house a spacious bedroom suite that varies in configuration from each of the others, providing spatial variety and surprise. The large central pavilion houses two additional bedroom suites on a mezzanine level and open loft-like public rooms on the main level below. Continuous diagonal hip beams splice clusters of the pyramidal roofs together, creating spaces that undulate over the continuous floor plans below.
The first phase of construction of a new compound for exhibiting innovative contemporary sculptural work required renovation of a spacious former trolley repair shop, including a forty-foot tall exhibition hall illuminated by the renovated clerestory and equipped with its original, fully operational twenty ton gantry crane. Mezzanine and cellar levels and an exterior entry courtyard provide additional exhibition spaces as well as reception, office, and storage areas. Designed in association with Maya Lin Studio.
With only one month between the start of the lease and the public opening, this project involved a very rapid build out of a 5,500sf gallery and a 1,500 sf private viewing room as a temporary exhibition space in which London-based Ordovas Gallery presented an exhibition of the work of the renown Basque sculptor Eduardo Chillida. Executed in collaboration with Thomas Croft Architect / London.
The office is preoccupied with the design of space -- with shaping emptiness rather than mass, void as opposed to solid, the immaterial over the material, with treating empty, enveloping, concave, subjective volume -rather than convex objective form- as the fundamental medium of design. Each project is a spatial sculpture in which clearly delineated intersecting voids are the primary focus of the design, following from a conviction that essence of architecture –from which the aesthetic, utilitarian, emotional, and poetic qualities of architecture all ultimately derive- is space.
This loft was designed for a young couple looking to take maximum advantage of the tall ceilings and enormous windows in this SoHo loft. The loft had been occupied by artists in the 70s and partitioned into two separate units with a collection of typical illegal conversion features: raised bathroom floors, windowless bedrooms, jerry-rigged mezzanines, clothes dryers venting into coffee cans filled with water, and a single exposure of enormous windows, with no light or ventilation on the other three sides of the apartment. At a later date the two apartments where combined adding further chaos.
The project called for a gut renovation. The strategy was to create a generous, double-height living room at the front of the loft, with the bedrooms, kitchen and dining area all borrowing light and air from it. In order to allow light to penetrate as deeply into the private rooms as possible, the partitions separating these rooms from the light-filled living space were fashioned from etched glass panels, framed in satin aluminum, and composed of hinged leaves which allow the rooms to open directly to the double-height living space. At the mezzanine level, the floor joining the media room to the two children’s bedrooms was itself constructed of laminated glass, and configured as a bridge passing over the Dining Area. Light fixtures fitted into the translucent walls and floor provide varied means for lighting the public and private areas of the loft. A new central air conditioning system, concealed in the built-out party wall to conserve ceiling height, provides fresh air to the interior rooms.
The project is rendered architecturally as a series of clearly defined interpenetrating volumes. Materials are treated as the surfaces of concave spaces rather than as faces of convex solids. This careful delineation of volume focuses upon architectural space, rather than sculptural form, as the principal medium of the design.
The main living space occupies the entire north end of the penthouse. Here the ceiling rises to the underside of the third level terrace and then tapers upward through the full fifty-foot height of the penthouse structure. At the midpoint, a reading balcony is suspended on the exposed structural girders. At the attic level the outward sloping glass wall provides a vertiginous vista down to the Living Space four levels below. Furniture, fabrics, and finishes were designed by Ghislaine Viñas of Ghislaine Viñas Interior Design.
For more on this project see the following links:
This renovation posed the challenge of creating a serene, luminous pied-a-terre apartment in an existing two story space in which the principal living level located one-half story below ground level.
The apartment is entered from the building lobby directly onto the stair landing between the two floors of the apartment. The Living Dining and Kitchen areas are located on the larger lower level, which is one half story below sidewalk level. The experience of arrival at the entry landing from the adjacent dark paneled lobby belies this submerged location. Light wells up from the lower level, introduced through a large south-facing skylight which extends into the rear yard. The entry space, sheathed in sycamore paneling, connects the two floor levels, opening vistas through the apartment and distributing natural light to the interior bathrooms through etched glass partitions.
The apartment is designed for use during visits to New York by a single individual, a couple, a couple and guest, or a couple and their two young children. A sliding partition coverts the upper level bathroom from a single spacious bath with two lavatories a bathtub and a shower, to two self contained bathrooms with independent entrances. Likewise, a pivoting wardrobe cabinet converts the second sleeping area from a spacious guest room to two children’s bedrooms.
Similar transformable elements recur throughout the apartment. Appliances are completely concealed behind sycamore cabinets, allowing the kitchen to function as a serene background to the dining area. The simple island cabinet in the kitchen transforms into two corner chairs for adults and two smaller chairs for children.
The result is a flexible apartment which can accommodate a range of activities but effortlessly revert to a luminous, serene, contemplative foil for the stimulating environment of New York City. Designed in association with Maya Lin Studio.
The kitchen and bathroom, separated by a plane of laminated glass, were positioned at the windowless end of this deep and narrow loft space. This configuration allows daylight to filter into the bathroom. In the evening the glowing glass wall illuminates the interior end of the loft.
The house was designed to serve both as a private getaway for the owners -a couple with grown children- and as a summer and winter vacation house for larger gatherings, with ample room for guests and a large extended family.
The house sits on a wooded hillside which slopes downhill to the south into an open clearing. The house itself is composed of two long, parallel, shed-roofed bars running east to west, perpendicular to the slope of the site.
The southern bar, which houses the living and dining spaces, is configured as a single enormous light-filled double-height volume. This bright and spacious room is surrounded by tall windows and opens onto a continuous exterior porch along its entire southern edge. The porch roof is configured to shade the tall living room windows during the summer but admit sunlight in winter -to provide solar heating- when the sun is lower in the southern sky. In order to keep the Living Space as open as possible while resisting the heavy winds on the tall southern facade, the southern bar of the house was constructed on a steel frame, insulated and clad on the exterior but exposed on the interior.
Where the open glassy southern bar is configured to maximize sunlight and collect winter solar heat, the northern bar houses the smaller scale, more private spaces and is designed to form an insulated weather-tight buffer to the severe northern exposure. Standing seam metal cladding extends continuously from the roof and down the northern facade of the house, creating a maintenance free envelope penetrated only by the entry airlock vestibule and by a few punched windows.
This configuration of the house -elongated on the east-west axis, with the long, open, glass-enclosed, seasonally shaded living space facing south across the sloping meadow and the tightly enclosed northern bar of smaller spaces providing an insulated buffer for the harsh northern exposure, provides an optimal configuration for a passive solar house --capturing winter solar heat and screening out summer sun while allowing ample cross-ventilation.
Designed in collaboration with Alfredo Brillembourg.
Emerging construction processes are exploited to materialize a design direction focussed on space and vision, ranging from doubly-curved spatial volumes sculpted from glass-fiber-reinforced gypsum to porcelain facade panels which present nested visual scale which engage the moving point fo view from the architectural scale to the threshold of visual legibility.
In order to take greater advantage of their spacious rear yard and existing swimming pool, the owners of this three-bedroom, split-level house wished to renovate the existing Kitchen and Dining Room and add a new Living Room to the rear of the house.
The design of the addition abandons both the doctrinaire modernist practice of making a clear separation between traditional house and modern addition and the post-modernist strategy of directly mimicking the original building. Instead the original house transforms into a distorted reflection of itself.
The addition has a deceptively simple, rectilinear plan. At roof level, however, the forms break out of the orthagonal. Three parallel steel beams skew vertically and horizontally across the addition to their points of intersection with the original house.
The white painted wood eave trim of the existing gambrel roof--which is the strongest feature of the original house—follows the skewed geometry of these beams into the addition. The eave line first folds up in a mirror image of the original roofline, and then skews in plan and section to create edge of the open, asymmetrically folded volume of the new Living Room. The facetted roofline allows the formerly dark attic area above the Kitchen and Dining Room to be opened to the rear yard and to the Dining and Family Rooms below. Continuous lead-coated copper cladding folds off the original house, over the ridges and valleys framed by the parallel beams, and down over the perimeter walls to grade level.
On the facades, the original cedar shingles give way to vertical cedar siding at the zone where new merges with old, and this gives way to steel sash windows and metal siding as the new enclosure folds away form the original house. The precise point where old and new construction meet is blurred. The result of this design strategy is a grafted, mutated, hybrid extrapolation of the familiar forms of the original building.
This duplex penthouse overlooking Central Park features a blackened steel stairway suspended from the upper level structure. The suspended stairway hangs over a marble plinth and pool occupying the entry hall of this loft-like lower level living space. Designed in association with Legorreta+Legorreta.
This five-bedroom house occupies one of the most extraordinary building sites in the Hudson Valley, with an unobstructed 140-degree panoramic view that sweeps from the Tappan Zee to the north east down the Hudson to the skyline of Manhattan directly to the south. The open public Living/Dining/Kitchen zone of the house is configured as a large bay window encompassing the view to the horizon. Strategically located skylights illuminate the living room seating, dining table and kitchen island, balancing inside light with the exterior vista. A deeply overhanging porch extends along the entire Hudson River side of the house, shading the interior spaces from summer sun while allowing lower winter sunlight to enter. The garage is rotated so that the sloping roof faces directly south and is fitted with solar panels, collecting power for the owners’ pair of electrical cars. Landscaping and photography to be completed in the Spring of 2021.
Two existing West Chelsea industrial buildings were combined and renovated to provide temporary facilities for the exhibition, education, and production of new media artworks. An open atrium, enclosed at by glass and rear projection film, was introduced at the entrance to the facility by removing a section of the roof between existing steel beams. Projected images on the atrium screen combined with installations within the atrium and views into the gallery itself create a highly animated zone of overlapping activity at the entrance to this facility.
In order to provide more sources of natural light for the tall pyramidal living room, the volume of the vault of the dormer windows at the third level is extruded in through the dormer window on one side of the penthouse, across the entire width of the third level, and out the window on the opposite side.
This linear volume intersects with the sloping surfaces at the pyramidal living room volume, creating voids through the light from the dormers spills in to reach both the bedroom and the living space below.
A shutter slides across the dormer volume to provide privacy when the bedroom is in use.
For more on this project see the following links:
David Hotson Architect acted as the executive architect on the renovation of the offices of the Secretary General and President of the United Nations, located immediately behind the main podium of the UN General Assembly building in New York. This project was designed in association with INLAY, a team of young Swiss artists and architects who won a national competition to design the gift of the Swiss Government to the United Nations on the occasion of Switzerland's joining the UN as a full member.
UN Secretary General Kofi Annan presided over the dedication of the office suite at the beginning of the UN General Assembly in September 2004.