The exterior facade of the Washington National Cathedral (WNC) contains hundreds of intricate layers of architectural detail. When looking at these layers of detail, one might ask “Who made that spire?” or “How did that gargoyle come to be?” or “How long has it been here?” Sometimes the answers are surprising.

In 2021, the WNC was awarded a $250,000 grant from the National Fund for Sacred Places to repair masonry damaged by the 2011 earthquake in Washington, D.C. The National Fund is a program of Partners for Sacred Places in collaboration with the National Trust. While following along with that repair work, National Trust staff heard about Iris Howe, who in the summer and fall of 2022 carved two finials for the WNC as part of a summer internship and capstone project. This experience was part of Howe’s training to be a stone carver at the American College of the Building Arts located in Charleston, South Carolina.

In May of 2023 Howe graduated, and now works in Charleston as a stone carver. When asked about the legacy and permanence of her work, Howe said, “when I’m carving, I am just thinking about the moment I am in. I am never thinking about how long my work is going to be in existence when I am carving. I don’t think about that until I’m done with something and am mulling it over. [For the WNC finials] it wasn’t until I was done and looking at the finials [and showing it to others] that it hit me that my work would exist long into the future.”

To learn more—including the challenges of moving heavy stone hundreds of miles —I asked Howe a few questions about the process of restoring and carving finials for the WNC.

How did you become interested in stone carving and why did you decide to pursue it as a career?

When it came time to pick colleges, I thought about things I was good at: I was good at chorus, I was good at art, but what I was really great at was building things with LEGOs. At the time, the architectural stone training program at the American College of the Building Arts (ACBA) primarily focused on masonry, so it was mostly training skills associated with bricklaying and with a little bit of stone carving. I thought, ‘I’m really good at LEGOs so I’ll be really good at bricklaying’, so I chose the ACBA for school, and I specifically chose the architectural stone specialization.

Once I got to school, however, the program had shifted its focus from masonry to stone carving, and I [became] the first student to focus solely on stone carving. We learned the basics of masonry, like how to repoint and how to lay brick, but I was the first one to just do carving from the start.

What were the logistics of moving around large pieces of stone – specifically, moving them around in/around Washington DC, Northern Virginia, and Charleston?

During winter break, I drove my mom’s van up to Washington, D.C. from Northern Virginia and picked up the model (the one from the building that is used to carve the new finials), the finial I had partially completed during my internship, and the finial I was going to carve from start to finish as part of my capstone. Once I finished them, I loaded them in my little Acura sedan and drove them from Charleston to Northern Virginia. I strapped the model in the passenger seat with the seatbelt, put one finial in the backseat and one in the trunk so the weight distribution wouldn’t mess up my car. They each weighed about 100 pounds.

Once I got to Northern Virginia, we loaded them back into my mom’s van and drove the van [into the city], dropped them off at the Cathedral, and drove home. Both are going on the central tower but haven’t been installed yet. They’re working their way around the building, and I don’t think they’ll get to that part for another year or two.

Once you got the stone to school to begin working on it, what did you do next?

I took a lot of measurements and made templates. It took probably about an hour of work taking measurements from the model and from the parts of the finial I had already partially completed to make templates out of plywood. The templates are used to trace the shape onto the stone so you know where to carve. You have to make a bunch of reverses which is an opposite of what the shape is. Once all of that is done, you start cutting and carving. Sometimes you start with just a block of stone but the finials for the Cathedral had been roughly cut to shape with a CNC router before I got them. In this case the CNC router takes away large amounts of material, leaving the shaping and detail work to the stone carvers.

How much creative autonomy were you given in the process?

I think it’s important when you’re doing restoration work, it’s something that someone has already done and it’s not about you and it’s not about how good you are. It’s about matching what’s already there. I think it’s cool that I did it, and that it will last a long time, but I am not in it so that I can point to it and say, “I did that.” It’s such a small piece on the building, but hundreds of people contributed to this, it’s not about me and my creativity.

I think the biggest thing I learned from working at the cathedral is respecting the work that other people did before you and not trying to out-do them in this type of work. Unlike art, restoration is not about making something that hasn’t existed before. I appreciate both sides of it, but I think I prefer restoration because it’s more of a puzzle. It’s about making it look right again. I carved my initials into the finials but it’s so tiny that even if you know what to look for you must be very close to see it.