Build the temple tower as a solid stepped mass of brick, each stage set back on the one below, with a shrine on its summit and stairs climbing its principal face.
Rules · Walls · Ornament · Façades
Articulate brick walls with buttresses and recesses
Break the long faces of brick walls with regularly spaced shallow buttresses (or recesses), so that light and shadow give scale and rhythm to a material without mouldings.
From the temples of Uruk in the fourth millennium BC, Mesopotamian builders marked sacred walls with buttresses and stepped niches. The device stiffens a thin wall, sheds rain, and above all makes a plain brick mass legible. It reappears in Egyptian “palace façade” panelling of the earliest dynasties and on the ziggurat of Ur.
Related rules
Build the core of sun-dried mud brick; case it with baked brick laid in bitumen, with layers of reed matting through the mass and weep holes to let water out.
Lay the city out square, walled and moated, with the river through its middle; run the streets straight, some along the river and others across it at right angles, each ending at a gate in the wall along the bank.
Build the temple tower in seven levels on a square base, the first two stages tall and the upper four low, with the god’s house on top, so that its total height equals the side of its base.
base 15 nindan (≈ 90 m) = height; stages 5½, 3, 1, 1, 1, 1 and temple 2½ nindan high
Raise and pave the processional road from the city gate to the god’s temple, wall it on both sides, and build the gate of glazed brick bearing the beasts of the gods, with cedar roofs and bronze-clad doors.
Cite this page Chris Paton, “Articulate brick walls with buttresses and recesses”, The Textbook of Architecture, https://textbookofarchitecture.com/rule/buttressed-walls. Text, drawings and models licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0.