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.