Ustad Ahmad Lahauri
English
Lahauri is the architect most often credited with the Taj Mahal, though the attribution rests on later sources rather than on contemporary building records, and Mughal practice credited the emperor as patron rather than any individual designer.
He served as a court architect under Shah Jahan in the middle of the seventeenth century, the period of the empire's most ambitious building, and is also associated with the Red Fort at Delhi. The case for his role at Agra comes largely from an account written by his son.
The buildings themselves are better documented than the man. What is not in doubt is the architectural system they belong to: a Persian-derived vocabulary of iwan, dome and formal garden, executed in white marble and red sandstone at a scale and standard of finish the empire did not repeat.
His birth and death dates are not reliably established.
