A Gothic cathedral finished across eight decades collects incidental history the way older buildings rarely get the chance to, and Washington National Cathedral has more of it built into the stone than most. The building carries one hundred and twelve carved gargoyles, water spouts worked into its exterior in the medieval tradition where a gargoyle's open mouth channels rainwater away from the walls, and well over a thousand grotesques besides, purely decorative figures carved in the same fantastical spirit but with no functional spout.
Not every one of them is medieval in spirit. In the nineteen eighties the cathedral's stonecarvers ran a children's contest through National Geographic World magazine inviting young readers to design a new grotesque for the building, and the winning submissions were carved into the fabric alongside centuries older subjects; a boy named Christopher Rader's third place drawing of Darth Vader was one of the four selected, and it still looks out from a northwest tower today, a science fiction villain keeping company with medieval beasts.
The cathedral's two hundred and fifteen stained glass windows include an even less expected object. The Scientists and Technicians Window, known simply as the Space Window, was designed around a fragment of lunar rock, seven grams of it, donated by the crew of Apollo eleven and set directly into the glass, so that a piece of the moon sits inside a building whose foundation stone predates powered flight by only four years.
Structurally the cathedral is built the old way despite its modern completion date, solid masonry with Indiana limestone as its primary material and no structural steel hidden inside the walls, a nineteenth century method of building carried, deliberately, into the twentieth.