'Doris Duke's Shangri La' Fantastic Monument to Islamic Art

NEWS OBSERVER
By David Menconi

The mosaic tile panel that forms a gateway on the dining room lanai is from Iran, likely from the 19th century.

NORTH CAROLINA---The Taj Mahal has inspired countless flights of fancy over the last 31/2 centuries, but most of them pale when compared to how the fabled Indian palace fired Doris Duke’s imagination. The billionaire heiress first visited the Taj Mahal in 1935 while on her 10-month honeymoon trip, and she decided she’d like to build something like it. And she spent the next six decades until her death in 1993 doing just that. You can see the fruits of her labor in “Doris Duke’s Shangri La: Architecture, Landscape and Islamic Art,” an exhibition on display at Duke University’s Nasher Museum of Art through Dec. 29. Shangri La was Duke’s personal Taj Mahal, her oceanfront estate in Hawaii. [link]