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.
Houses round a patio, the shrine on the east
Build a household as three or four houses on low platforms round a small patio, with the family’s shrine, over the ancestors’ graves, on the east side.
The patio group was the unit of Maya settlement: an extended family, with a kitchen, a store and fields round about. Surveys at Tikal mapped thousands of them spreading for kilometres from the centre among gardens and forest, the better ones with a small eastern temple in which the family’s dead were buried: the royal plan of the Great Plaza repeated in miniature.
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.
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.
Cite this page Chris Paton, “Houses round a patio, the shrine on the east”, The Textbook of Architecture, https://textbookofarchitecture.com/rule/maya-plazuela-group. Text, drawings and models licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0.