Treat the stepped pyramid as a platform whose purpose is to lift a small temple towards the sky, reached by a single steep stair on its principal face; enlarge it by building a new shell over the old.
Temples in the middle, the poor at the edge
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.
Landa describes the towns of Yucatán before the conquest as orderly and concentric: rank fell away with distance from the sacred centre. He adds that the townspeople built the houses of their lords for them, and that the lord’s house stood nearest the temple.
He was writing of the sixteenth century, not of the Classic cities abandoned centuries before; but at Tikal and elsewhere the size of house platforms, the quality of their masonry and the richness of their burials all fall off outward from the ceremonial core, as his account would lead one to expect.
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.
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.
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, “Temples in the middle, the poor at the edge”, The Textbook of Architecture, https://textbookofarchitecture.com/rule/landa-town-rings. Text, drawings and models licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0.