SkyHouse is a private residence constructed within the previously unoccupied four-story penthouse structure at the summit of one of the earliest surviving skyscrapers in New York City. 

When architect David Hotson first encountered the penthouse, over twelve decades after its completion, the interior was a raw shell, with oddly configured partial floors and no services other than an industrial gas heater and the minimal bathroom and kitchenette required for it to be sold as a residential condominium unit.  Only the original riveted steel structural frame, the arched windows and the upward tapering volume of space under the enormous roof provided evidence of the late 19th century when the building was built. 

These few elements from another era established one pole for a residential interior otherwise anchored unmistakably in the present.  The owners wanted a residence that was rigorous yet playful, uncompromising in the precision of its conception and execution, multi-level spaces and oblique vista into the surrounding cityscape that continually refresh the experience of living at the summit of a skyscraper, surrounded -above and below- by the skyline of Lower Manhattan.

This penthouse was the recipient of a Best of Year Award from editors of Interior Design Magazine, and was later selected as the most extraordinary apartment of the first decade of the Best of Year Awards.  The penthouse was also awarded the Jury Prize by the international Architizer A+ Awards program, as the most extraordinary apartment of the year worldwide.  

Photography by Dean Kaufman

For more on SkyHouse please see the links below:

chapter one: introduction

chapter two: the slide 

chapter three:  the stairwell

chapter four: the living room

chapter five: a bedroom

chapter six: another bedroom

chapter seven: a bit more

chapter eight: the film 

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.

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.

The Slide: At the suggestion of the owners, we inserted a mirror polished stainless steel slide that coils down through all four levels of the penthouse.

The slide is entered through a circular hole cut in the seamless sloping glass partition at the south end of the Attic.

Visitors are invited to select a yellow cashmere blanket from the pile beside the entrance to speed their trip to the bottom….

The slide coils around a column and over the double-height guest bedroom. Interior designer Ghislaine Vinas installed a startling mural, inspired by Michael Jackson’s Neverland, in the only vertical wall in the room, scattering shards of saturated color along the mirror-polished surface.   The slide 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.

A landing provides an opportunity to make a local stop at the third level or to re-enter the slide to continue the rest of the way down. 

The lower leg 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 tube flares out to create a distorted rectangular mirror which forms the wall of the Library and deposits the visitor back at the foot of the staircase.

For a more detailed look at SkyHouse please follow the links found in ‘skyhouse / chapter one’

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 most prominent civic feature of the city center of Yerevan, Armenia is the Cascade, a monumental, 300-meter-high terraced structure with gardens, fountains, and continuous stairs on its exterior and galleries, shops, and public escalators inside. Sheathed in white travertine, the Cascade is a well-used public amenity for Yerevan as well as a component of urban pedestrian circulation, connecting the downtown Kentron district with the neighborhoods on the hills above. However, the Cascade was never finished; construction began in the 1970s but was suspended during the turmoil of the 1980s, leaving the upper third of the structure unfinished. In the late 2000s, David Hotson_Architect proposed a design for a museum complex to fill the hole at the top of the Cascade; this complex, the Cafesjian Center for the Arts, began construction but was placed on hold in 2009 following the global financial crisis. At a moment when consensus is growing to finally complete the Cascade, the “Cascade Gardens Cultural Center" proposal represents the further development of these existing plans for a modern Yerevan in the midst of great transformation.

DH_A specializes in creating immersive, enveloping figures of architectural space, shaped to respond to the moving point of view and suspend the visitor in present experience. A unique domain in which deploy this experiential approach is the design of living spaces constructed within previously unused, multi-level penthouse properties at the summit of converted pre-war commercial skyscrapers in New York City.  These unconventional properties have unusual structural systems and complex spatial volumes defy easy visualization.  To enhance artistic control of the medium of architectural space, DH_A is expanding our use of emerging technologies to accurately map and model these complex site conditions.

Mapping the Summit of a New York Landmark 

A paradigm of this complex spatial condition is the Pinnacle Penthouse, located at the summit of the Landmarked 1913 Woolworth Building in Lower Manhattan. DH_A invited industry leader Existing Conditions to prepare a digital scan of the raw, tapering, six-story structural shell of the Pinnacle Penthouse, situated sixty stories above Broadway in Lower Manhattan. 

Mapping the Interior: A Terrestrial LiDAR Point Cloud Scan

To scan the complex tapering interior, industry leader Existing Conditions used tripod-mounted Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) equipment, which tags the precise location of millions of individual points in space. The result is a point cloud, a diaphanous spatial model that renders every detail of the complex tapering interior as a matrix of points in space. 

Existing Conditions then converted the point cloud data into a manipulable computer model, produced more rapidly, cost-effectively, and at a vastly higher level of precision than could be accomplished with a manual survey. Nesting the point cloud model inside the completed Revit model allows the design team to toggle between precise existing field conditions and proposed design conditions as the design process proceeds.

Mapping the Exterior: Drone-deployed Photogrammetry

The exterior scan presented an even greater challenge.  The lower areas of the exterior could be scanned by terrestrial LIDaR equipment located on the encircling 49th floor terrace but the remainder of the exterior needed to be scanned using drones.  Flying drones sixty stories above the sidewalks of Lower Manhattan requires FAA-licensed drone pilots and clearance from the NYPD, which Existing Conditions delivered on schedule.  Aerial drone scanning equipment cannot yet provide the stability and precision required for LIDaR point cloud scanning.  Instead Existing Conditions provided an array of hundreds of photographs which document the otherwise inaccessible exterior of the penthouse from every point of view.  These photographs are then stitched together in software that calculates the parallax between the separate views in order to create a rough three-dimensional model.  

The Point Cloud as an expressive document

The diaphanous point cloud, with the series of digital models nested within it, is an architectural document with its own artistic qualities.  Follow this link for additional explorations of the point cloud at the summit of the Woolworth Building. 

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 Stairwell: The stairwell shaft, positioned over the main entrance, 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 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 spans across the stairwell shaft. 

The original riveted steel structure –clad in intumescent paint- threads through the faceted stairwell, slipping through apertures into adjacent rooms.

At the entrance to the penthouse, the private elevator opens into a tall vestibule, tapering upward to converge on a seamless rectangular oculus which frames the 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.

For a more detailed look at SkyHouse please follow the links found in ‘skyhouse / chapter one’

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.

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 office focusses on the delineation of volumes of architectural space filled with natural light -- treating the immaterial figure of architectural space as the essential medium of the art of architecture.

The Living Room: 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 a more detailed look at SkyHouse please follow the links found in ‘skyhouse / chapter one’

The office makes use of digitally-driven fabrication processes to materialize a design direction focussed on space and vision, ranging from doubly-curved spatial figures fabricated from digitally-modeled glass-fiber-reinforced gypsum to porcelain facade panels printed with digitally scripted design which continuously reveal layers of detail from the architectural scale to the threshold of visual legibility.