The Church of Saint Sarkis is the home of the greater Dallas Armenian community, largely made up of the descendants of the diaspora resulting from the Armenian Genocide of 1915.
The primary facade depicts a traditional Armenian cross rendered in high resolution on the digitally printed porcelain rainscreen. As a visitor approaches the entire facade dissolves into 1.5 million tiny icons or pixels, generated by a computer script to make every icon unique. Each icon represents one of the 1.5million individuals who perished in the 1915 Armenian genocide, providing a visceral encounter with the scale of this historical atrocity.
Stepping into the church, the visitor emerges into the luminous sanctuary, a composition of light-filled spatial volumes scaled and proportioned on the model of the interior of Saint Hripsime. The interior vaults are smooth and scaleless, with no visible technical details to interrupt luminous spatial figure. Concave light coves in the precast concrete exterior admit the powerful Texas sunlight indirectly into the interior space. The result is an ethereal quality of natural illumination that shifts with the cloud cover and time of day.
