by Jon Lackman | 14 February 2009 | Architecture, Asia
From The National of Abu Dhabi:
“Basically, I am an art historian,” he says by way of introduction, but this is a typically modest description. Since the 1970s, he has been one of the world’s leading forces behind the renaissance of traditional Islamic and Indian craftsmanship, arguing continually for their protection and that of those who practise them. He and his team have worked on mammoth projects such as the Federal Territory Mosque in Kuala Lumpur and the Al Masjid al Haram mosque in Mecca … “What I try to do is bring back Indian and classical art to the level of Shah Jahan, who built the Taj Mahal,” he says. That is exactly what he and his team aimed to do with their work on the Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan Mosque in 2005 … This contract was a huge undertaking: 232 craftsmen worked for 14 months on the 1,050 columns for the entrance and side arcades. In the end, the project used a total of 1,136,212 semi-precious stones for the floral inlay of the columns: lapis lazuli, amethyst, bloodstone, agate and red onyx among them …
At first glance, a life steeped in Indian and Islamic design and architecture seems an unlikely path for someone who was born on the banks of the Mississippi and is a direct descendant of Jesse James. How, exactly, did this intense interest in art begin? “Well, actually I’m part American-Indian, and my grandfather was an amateur archaeologist who used to dig around us for arrowheads when I was a kid. But really, when I was 14 and living in Missouri, a friend came back from India, and that was my first exposure to someone who’d been abroad. “I went to the University of Chicago to study ancient Indian history and then went to India in 1966 to do my thesis in New Delhi. And that was it. I fell in love.”
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