THE ST. SARKIS MEMORIAL FAÇADE
Faith, memory & 1.5 million livesStand far enough away from St. Sarkis Armenian Church and the western façade seems to carry one enormous image: an Armenian cross.
Walk toward it. The cross begins to change. Its solid shape breaks apart into curling vines, interwoven lines and geometric forms drawn from centuries of Armenian art.
A MEMORIAL YOU HAVE TO APPROACH
The façade was designed so that it cannot be understood from only one viewpoint. From a distance, you see the whole. Up close, you see the individual. That change in scale is the heart of the memorial.
The architects describe the façade as a layered visual experience. At first, the eye recognizes a traditional Armenian cross with branching arms. As you approach, that image resolves into interwoven botanical and geometric ornament. Only when you come very close do you discover that those patterns are themselves composed of thousands upon thousands of individual circular emblems.
The experience turns an enormous number --
1,500,000
— into something you encounter one mark at a time.
EVERY CIRCLE IS DIFFERENT
Each circular ornament on the façade is approximately one centimeter in diameter. There are exactly 1.5 million across the memorial surface. No two are identical.
That difference is essential to the design. The circles do not simply represent a statistic. Each unique ornament stands for one unique individual who perished during the Armenian Genocide.
From across the courtyard, 1.5 million people can feel almost impossible to imagine. At the wall, the number becomes a field of individual marks.
WHY CIRCLES?
The small emblems were not invented as arbitrary computer pixels. Their forms were derived from circular motifs that recur throughout Armenian artistic tradition, including designs associated with continuity and infinity. The larger patterns they create draw from Armenian botanical and geometric ornament.
This is one reason the façade feels both ancient and contemporary. Its visual language comes from Armenian art. Its method of making could only have been achieved with modern technology.
FROM ORNAMENT TO CROSS
Step away again and those individual circles begin to disappear. Your eye starts combining them into larger shapes. The larger shapes become intertwined strands. And eventually those strands form the great branching cross across the western façade.
The architect describes those intertwined botanical and geometric forms as evoking the bonds of ancestry, language, culture and tradition that have held Armenian communities together through centuries of upheaval. The cross itself is sometimes described as an Armenian Tree of Life, with floral branches extending from its arms.
So the image works at several scales:
Individual lives become part of a larger community without losing their individuality.
ANCIENT ART, MODERN TECHNOLOGY
Creating 1.5 million different ornaments by hand would have been practically impossible. Instead, the design team wrote a computer script to generate 1.5 million unique circular designs.
The program did more than create them. It also controlled their placement and density so that, when seen from farther away, millions of tiny individual marks would combine to form the larger Armenian patterns and ultimately the cross.
This is sometimes called computational design: using algorithms as part of the architectural design process. Here, technology was not used simply because it was new. It made the memorial concept possible.
PRINTED ON PORCELAIN
Once the digital design existed, it still had to become architecture. The façade was fabricated by the Italian manufacturer Fiandre, which developed a process for printing the extremely detailed design at high resolution onto exterior-grade, UV-resistant porcelain rainscreen panels.
Those panels had to survive outdoors in North Texas while preserving ornaments only about a centimeter across. So something inspired by medieval Armenian visual traditions was produced through computer coding, high-resolution digital printing and contemporary architectural materials.
ANCIENT PATTERN. MODERN PROCESS. PERMANENT MEMORIAL.
A CHURCH LOOKING BACK 1,400 YEARS
The façade is contemporary, but the building behind it deliberately looks much farther into Armenian history.
St. Sarkis was designed by David Hotson Architect, with project architect Stepan Terzyan. Its church form was modeled on the ancient Church of St. Hripsimé, completed near Vagharshabad in Armenia in 618 AD. Rather than reproducing every detail of St. Hripsimé, the architects drew from its scale, proportions and spatial form and reinterpreted them using contemporary materials and construction.
That makes St. Sarkis an unusual meeting of two moments in Armenian history: a church form rooted in the seventh century, and a memorial responding to the events of the twentieth century — built for an Armenian community in twenty-first-century Texas.
WHY THE CHURCH FACES WEST
The orientation adds another layer to the story. The entrance and memorial façade face west, looking across the broad Texas landscape.
David Hotson Architect describes that orientation as looking symbolically toward the distant Armenian homeland from which the ancestors of many members of the congregation were displaced during the Genocide. For a diaspora church thousands of miles from Armenia, architecture becomes a way of connecting place and memory.
APRIL 24
The timing of the church’s opening was intentional as well. St. Sarkis was consecrated on April 23, 2022. Its first Sunday service took place the following day: April 24.
April 24 is observed by Armenians around the world as Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day. So the first congregation to enter through the completed memorial façade did so on the day dedicated to remembering the people represented upon it.
That connection makes the façade more than something attached to the church. Visitors literally pass through the memorial to enter the sanctuary.
FROM MEMORY INTO LIGHT
Once inside, the architectural experience changes again. The gray, patterned memorial façade gives way to a sanctuary filled with soft, indirect natural light.
The interior proportions recall St. Hripsimé, but concealed openings reflect the strong Texas sunlight onto smooth white vaults rather than allowing direct beams into the space.
The movement through the building therefore has its own sequence: memory outside, the threshold, light inside. It is architecture designed not only to be looked at, but to be experienced while moving through it.
LOOK AGAIN
Adventure 9 of the Junior Explorer Guide asks you to try something important. Don’t just photograph the façade. Move.
Start far away. Find the cross. Walk closer until you begin seeing the vines and interwoven patterns. Then keep going. Get close enough that the larger picture disappears. Find one tiny circle. Remember that there are 1.5 million.
Then turn around and walk away from the wall. Watch the individual circles become patterns. Watch the patterns become a cross.
THE BUILDING HAS NOT CHANGED.
YOUR POINT OF VIEW HAS.
And that is exactly how the memorial was designed to work.
NINE ADVENTURES IN THE GUIDE
Pomegranates, Mount Ararat, khachkars, Kochari, the Armenian alphabet and more — every adventure has a page like this one.
