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

skyhouse / chapter 6_the stair

skyhouse / chapter 7_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 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.

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 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: 

Skyhouse_1. Entry/Stairwell

Skyhouse_3. Living Room

Skyhouse_4. Center Bedroom

Skyhouse_5. North Bedroom

Skyhouse_6. Process

Skyhouse_7. Film

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 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.

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.