delight.

NO MATTER HOW WELL YOU KNOW (OR THINK YOU KNOW) A GREAT WORK OF ARCHITECTURE, IT CAN CONTINUE TO SURPRISE AND DELIGHT IRRESPECTIVE OF HOW MANY TIMES YOU RETURN TO APPRECIATE IT.

Who hasn't been disappointed when visiting some of the great buildings of the world? The main front of St Peter's appears squashed and confused after the magnificence of Bernini's colonnades. The ill-restored Registan Square in Samarkand rumbles to the racket of polluting traffic. Close up, Sydney Opera House seems clumsy and confused. Chandigarh's great monumental buildings are blown apart by Modernism.

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The Taj Mahal is the complete opposite. You think you know it from innumerable postcards and calendars: it's axial therefore predictable and dull; it's a big white mass, more confectionary than architecture; it's a huge edifice containing a mean little interior.

None of this is true. You approach through an outer court of red stone and a great monumental lodge. As you go through the gate, the Taj is suddenly there, overwhelming, immense, luminously filling the dark arch and dominating you and all your fellow visitors. The arch somehow acts as a telescope, presenting a close-up of the shimmering white skin that literally takes your breath away.

Then you come to the Mughal garden, a green platform that ends in a cliff overlooking the river, an enclosed plain so vast that it can easily absorb the crowds of tourists yet remain tranquil. Its green parterres and reflective pools are apparently unaltered since they were made nearly 400 years ago (the lawns are in fact cut every day with bullock-drawn mowers).

When you get up to the huge building, it is revealed as being extraordinarily delicate, its marble carved with exquisite flowers and inlaid with red, yellow, green and blue stones to make petrified tapestries. Inside, the faultless pietra dura craftsmanship is seen in the cool dim light to be even more fine than that of the exterior. The hundreds of thousands of hours of labour expended on the screens round the tomb Shah Jehan built for his favourite wife, Mumtaz Mahal, form an eloquent and still intensely moving embodiment of the love he bore her. P.D.