Adopt an Artifact: Washington National Cathedral Collection

For more than a century, the Washington National Cathedral has stood as both a national monument and a masterpiece of craftsmanship. Now, one of its most remarkable artistic legacies has joined the collections of the National Building Museum.  

In 2025, the Museum acquired beautiful, full-size drawings of the stained glass windows at the Washington National Cathedral. The Cathedral, located at the highest point of the District of Columbia on Mount St. Alban, was constructed over the course of almost eighty-three years. Since its first stone was laid in 1907, it has been the setting for pivotal events in national history, from Martin Luther King Jr.’s speeches at its pulpit to the state funerals of four presidents. Over the course of its enduring lifespan, its many decorative details have offered the perfect stage for craftspeople across the United States to showcase their work to a national audience.  

Almost fifty of the Cathedral’s stained glass pieces are the work of one man: Rowan LeCompte (1925-2014). LeCompte, a Baltimore native and son of New York architect H. Davis Ives, spent most of his life as one of the foremost stained glass artists in the United States. Alongside other commissions nationwide, his career spanned a nearly sixty-year relationship with the National Cathedral. He credited his first visit to the Cathedral at age 14 for his lifelong commitment to the stained glass artform, a prodigious skill that led him to his public installation in 1941, only two years later. 

LeCompte studied art at the New School, American University, and the Institute of Contemporary Arts in Washington. He toured many of France’s surviving Gothic cathedrals after five campaigns in Europe during World War II. In the early 1950s, he became a full-time professional in stained glass artistry and grew committed to the promotion of stained glass as a fine art form, one that could be practiced in harmony with historic Cathedral designs while still introducing modern techniques and contemporary thematic imagery. He preferred to emphasize the unique qualities of stained glass materials in his work, rather than imitating the style and conventions of painted canvases. A champion of the glass medium, he advocated for bold, dazzling designs that refused to be backgrounded solely as architectural detailing. 

Although LeCompte is responsible for chapel centerpieces across the United States, along with eighteen of the National Cathedral’s clerestory windows, his largest and most renowned work is the Cathedral’s West Rose Window. Completed in 1973, LeCompte worked alongside German craftsman Dieter Goldkuhle to complete the work, a strikingly nonrepresentational design that contains no human figures. Rather, it is an abstraction unfolding from its center, inspired by the scintillating fall leaves of northern Virginia, and conveying the gleam of sparks in darkness to symbolize the lines of St. John’s Gospel.  

November 12 marks the anniversary of the Cathedral’s reopening after the 2011 Virginia earthquake, which caused extensive damage to the historic structure. Several pinnacles and decorative features twisted and shattered, including one of LeCompte’s clerestory windows, resulting in over $25 million in damage. Fortunately, using the glass-reference drawings, or “cartoons,” LeCompte provided, the restoration of the window was successful. Now housed permanently at the National Building Museum, the drawings, life-size and vividly colored, attest to the beauty of the Cathedral space, yet also require careful conservation to remain intact. 

Help us preserve this history!

Click here to Adopt an Artifact and help protect this legacy.

The National Building Museum is home to the nation’s foremost archive of American architectural and design heritage. The Adopt an Artifact program allows you to directly support the proper care and preservation of objects with critical conservation needs, helping the Museum continue its mission to inspire curiosity about the world we design and build. To support this initiative, click here.