To make a small temple dominate the skyline, build a tall crest of masonry on its roof, set over the heavy rear wall and pierced with openings to lighten it; model it in painted stucco with the figure of the ruler or god.
Rules · Roofs · Materials · Plans
The Maya house: a steep thatch over a divided room
Build the house of wood and daub under a steep roof of thatch or palm, to throw off the rain; divide it along its length by a wall, with a whitewashed front room for receiving guests and a back room for sleeping.
The same house (one oblong room of poles and mud under a high hipped thatch, set on a low platform against the wet season) is still built in Yucatán, and is carved in stone on the façades of Puuc buildings such as the Nunnery at Uxmal. Excavation at Tikal finds its stone platforms by the thousand.
Related rules
Align the principal avenue and every building of the city to a single bearing (at Teotihuacan about 15½° east of north) so that the whole city shares one orientation with its great pyramids.
Keep the span of a corbelled room to about three metres or less and make it long instead of wide; to enlarge a building, add parallel galleries rather than widening them.
Maya room spans ≈ 1.5–3 m; vault rise ≈ 1–1½ × span
Orient the principal axis of the monument on the rising or setting of the sun at a solstice, so that the architecture frames it.
Put the temples and their plazas at the centre of the town; round them the houses of the lords and priests, then those of the leading people, and the houses of the common people at the outskirts.
Close the great plaza on the east and west with temple-pyramids facing each other across it, the ancestors’ acropolis on the north and the palaces on the south, so that the plaza lies on the east–west path of the sun.
Cite this page Chris Paton, “The Maya house: a steep thatch over a divided room”, The Textbook of Architecture, https://textbookofarchitecture.com/rule/landa-maya-house. Text, drawings and models licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0.