Beyond the Taj: Architectural Traditions and Landscape Experience in South Asia is a collection of materials on South Asian architecture assembled over a 22-year period by Professor Robert D. “Scotty” MacDougall (1940-1987), an architect and an anthropologist. The core of this collection consists of approximately 3,000 photographs depicting significant works of architecture through time and across regional traditions throughout continental India.

Robert MacDougall (B. Arch 1964; Ph.D Anthropology 1971) had a special interest in expanding the purview of architectural history to include Asian traditions and in bringing them to public attention through exhibits and educational programs. His research produced photographs, drawings and other records in subject areas that further challenged the boundaries of traditional architectural studies along particular lines. These rich materials, which are abundantly but only partially represented here, emphasized the domestic, the devotional, the vernacular and the textual.

Since Beyond the Taj has been culled from a much larger corpus of photographs, drawings and written materials, we plan to continue development of this site. In the future, we hope to include records from the ethnographic investigation of domestic architecture in Sri Lanka as well as the drawings and photographs of 89 Aiyanar temples, a vernacular tradition in the Tamil Nadu region of southern India.

Beyond the Taj is the product of a long-term collaboration between Bonnie Graham MacDougall, Associate Professor of Architecture, and Margaret Webster, Director of the George W. & Adelaide Knight Visual Resource Facility in the College of Architecture, Art and Planning. Margaret Webster’s willingness to preserve the images, to create an electronic database and to otherwise devote her energies to a project which at times seemed endless enabled us to make a successful application for funding to DCAPS in 2004 and to bring the work to its present form. A full set of acknowledgements of the many people who have contributed to this project appears in the credits. We would like to extend our special thanks to Carol LaGrow.

- Bonnie Graham MacDougall, February 2006