Washington National Cathedral

Congress chartered the Protestant Episcopal Cathedral Foundation in 1893 with authority to build a national cathedral in Washington, and the cornerstone was laid on a hill above the city in 1907 with President Theodore Roosevelt in attendance. Work proceeded through two world wars and the Depression, funded entirely by private donation, and was not declared complete until 1990, when President George H. W. Bush watched the final decorative finial set into place on the west towers.

The building follows English Gothic precedent closely, with flying buttresses, ribbed vaults and an extensive program of stained glass and stone carving. Its formal name, the Cathedral Church of Saint Peter and Saint Paul, is used mainly in liturgical contexts; almost everyone, including the cathedral's own signage, calls it the National Cathedral.

That national role, rather than any specifically Episcopal one, is what the building is most often asked to perform. Its congressional charter describes it as a house of prayer for all people. State funerals for Dwight Eisenhower, Ronald Reagan, Gerald Ford and George H. W. Bush were held under its vaults, alongside inaugural prayer services and national memorials drawing participants from far beyond the Episcopal Church.

The cathedral has also answered to ordinary structural hazards a building of its age and mass invites. A 2011 earthquake centered in Virginia cracked pinnacles and displaced stones from the central tower and flying buttresses, and the repair campaign stretched on for years, a reminder that a Gothic building finished only in living memory can still need the patient masonry its medieval predecessors required.

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.