Place the garbhagriha (the small dark chamber that houses the image) over the Brahmasthana, with its walls on the ring of the gods and its door on the axis, usually to the east.
Rules · Façades · Cities · Use
The gateway outgrows the shrine
In the later temple towns of the south, raise ever taller gateways (gopurams) in the successive enclosure walls, until the outer gates dwarf the shrine at the centre.
At Thanjavur the gateways are modest and the vimana dominates. From the twelfth century onward, as temples grew by adding enclosures (prakaras) around the old core, each new enclosure received a gateway larger than the last; under the Vijayanagara and Nayaka rulers the outermost gopurams reached fifty metres and more, their tapering tiers crowded with painted stucco figures and crowned by a barrel vault with a row of finials. The effect inverts the hierarchy of the diagram: the pilgrim sees the gates first and the sanctum hardly at all.
Related rules
Provide a path for circumambulation (pradakshina) in the clockwise direction, keeping the sacred object on the right, and enclose it with a railing that separates the sacred ground.
Break each face of the square sanctum into projections (rathas), three, five, seven or more, that step forward towards the central one, and carry them up unbroken through the wall and the tower.
tri-ratha 3 · pancha-ratha 5 · sapta-ratha 7 projections per face
Build the shrine in six parts from the ground up: base (adhiṣṭhāna), wall or pillars (pāda), entablature (prastara), neck (grīva), crowning roof (śikhara) and finial (stūpi).
Raise the vimana in receding storeys (talas), and edge each with a parapet (hara) of miniature shrines: square domed kutas at the corners, oblong barrel-roofed shalas in the middle, and small panjaras between.
Thanjavur: 13 talas; vimana ≈ 66 m
Choose the plan of a village from eight types named for their figures (daṇḍaka, sarvatobhadra, nandyāvarta, padmaka, svastika, prastara, kārmuka and caturmukha), according to its size, its site and who is to live in it.
Cite this page Chris Paton, “The gateway outgrows the shrine”, The Textbook of Architecture, https://textbookofarchitecture.com/rule/gopuram-growth. Text, drawings and models licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0.