Chief architect to Shah Jahan and, by the testimony of his own family, the designer of the Taj Mahal. Ahmad Lahauri came from Lahore, held the honorific Nadir al-Asr — "wonder of the age" — and worked as a mathematician and engineer as much as a builder; the Red Fort at Delhi is also credited to him. The Taj attribution rests on the Persian writings of his son Lutfullah Muhandis, who lists his father as the author of both the Agra tomb and the Delhi palace-fort, and it remains the strongest name attached to the building, though some scholars treat Mughal authorship as collective workshop practice. What the buildings show is a geometer: hierarchies of proportion, a double shell dome, and a plan resolved to bilateral symmetry at every scale.
