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.
A new plaza for every katun
At the end of each katun of twenty years, build a plaza with two flat-topped pyramids facing east and west, each with four stairs, a walled court on the north for the king’s stela and altar, and a range of nine doorways on the south.
Tikal’s kings built at least nine of these groups, each for a single ceremony, and did not reuse them. The plan is a diagram of the cosmos: the sun’s path east and west, the heavens on the north where the king’s stela stands open to the sky, and the underworld on the south, with its nine levels in the nine doorways.
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, “A new plaza for every katun”, The Textbook of Architecture, https://textbookofarchitecture.com/rule/maya-twin-pyramid-group. Text, drawings and models licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0.