Frame the doorway of a temple, palace or royal precinct with a second, larger recessed trapezoid, so that the opening steps back in two planes; keep the single jamb for ordinary buildings.
Palaces round the great square
Surround the great square with the houses of the kings, each opening onto it by a great hall large enough to hold a festival under cover when it rains.
Garcilaso walks round Haucaypata naming the royal houses: Coracora, Cassana, Amarucancha, the house of the chosen women. Each dead king’s palace was kept by his lineage, and his mummy still lived in it. He remembered the great halls from his boyhood (the one at Cassana, he says, could hold three thousand) and a handsome round tower of fine stone with a very tall thatched roof that stood in the square.
Related rules
Divide the city into two halves, Hanan (upper) and Hurin (lower), each with its own lineages, its own shrines and its own place in the rites.
Let the four royal roads to the four quarters of the empire begin in the great square of the capital, so that the city is the centre from which the whole realm is divided.
Settle the lords of every province in a ward of the capital lying on the side of the city toward their own province, so that the city holds the order of the whole empire.
Build every household, palace and temple as a kancha: a rectangular walled enclosure with a single doorway to the street, its single-room houses set against the walls and facing a central court; pair the kanchas back to back to make the blocks of the town.
Cite this page Chris Paton, “Palaces round the great square”, The Textbook of Architecture, https://textbookofarchitecture.com/rule/garcilaso-plaza-palaces. Text, drawings and models licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0.