Why Darth Vader Is Carved on Washington National Cathedral

Near the top of the northwest tower of Washington National Cathedral, one of the most important churches in the United States, a limestone Darth Vader stares down at the parking lot. It is not graffiti or a prank. The Star Wars villain was approved by the cathedral itself after a children's design contest held in 1985.

The contest ran while the cathedral's two west towers were still being built. Word spread nationwide through National Geographic World, the children's magazine of the National Geographic Society, and readers mailed in drawings of creatures to be carved in stone. According to the cathedral and to the sculptor who modeled it, the drawing of Vader by Christopher Rader, a boy from Kearney, Nebraska, took third place.

The other winning designs were a raccoon, a girl with pigtails and braces, and a man with large teeth holding an umbrella. Cathedral spokesman Kevin Eckstrom told NBC4 Washington in 2023 that the winners have been set on small gables near one another since 1986, and joked that Vader had actually finished fourth.

Turning a child's sketch into stone took two craftsmen. Jay Hall Carpenter, who worked at the cathedral from 1976 to 1996 and became its first artist in residence, modeled the helmet in clay using Rader's drawing and still frames from the films. Carpenter says he designed some 400 grotesques, gargoyles and angels for the west towers. Stone carver Patrick J. Plunkett then cut the final head in limestone.

Technically, Vader is a grotesque, not a gargoyle. A gargoyle carries rainwater away through a pipe in its mouth, and the cathedral has about 112 of them. A visitor leaflet from the cathedral explains that grotesques, which number about 1,130 there, shed rain off the tops of their heads and noses instead, keeping water away from the stone walls.

Finding him is a challenge. The leaflet tells visitors to walk out of the northwest ramp entrance into the parking lot, turn back toward the tower and look almost to the top, where a small peaked gable sits between two huge louvered arches. Vader is on its north side, and a larger carved skull lower down often fools people. Binoculars help, since he faces the shadier north side of the building. As Eckstrom put it, he is on the dark side.

Playful carvings have a long history at the cathedral. In the 1960s, carver John Guarente made a gargoyle mocking his boss, master carver Roger Morigi, as a devil with horns, a tail and a mushroom cloud bursting out of his hat to show his famous temper. Smithsonian folklorist Marjorie Hunt wrote that carvers depicting themselves and their coworkers is a practice centuries old.

The building that holds all these faces took a long time to finish. The foundation stone was laid on September 29, 1907, with President Theodore Roosevelt present, and the last stone was set on the west towers on September 29, 1990, exactly 83 years later. The cathedral is built of Indiana limestone with no structural steel and calls itself the sixth largest cathedral in the world.

Carpenter recalls that years later, while working on a statue commissioned by George Lucas, he asked the director about the Vader carving, and Lucas said he had not heard of it. Eckstrom said the cathedral had never been contacted by Lucas or Disney about copyright.

Sources: Jay Hall Carpenter; Washington National Cathedral on Google Arts and Culture; Washington National Cathedral visitor leaflet; NBC4 Washington (2023); Washington National Cathedral: timeline; Washington National Cathedral: fun facts; Smithsonian Magazine. Cover: Washington National Cathedral seen from the northwest.