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.
Temples facing across the plaza on the sun’s path
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.
In Maya thought the east, where the sun is born, and the west, where it enters the underworld, were the principal directions; the north was associated with the sky and the ancestors. At Tikal the plan makes the idea literal: Temple I on the east over the tomb of the king Jasaw Chan K’awiil, Temple II on the west facing it, the North Acropolis (a millennium of royal tombs) on the north, the palace ranges on the south.
The rule is inferred from the buildings; no Maya text states it. Similar arrangements recur in other Classic cities, and the earlier “E-groups”, like Tikal’s Lost World, set a pyramid on the west to watch the sun rise over a long platform on the east.
Related rules
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.
Join the great groups of the city by raised, plastered causeways (sacbeob), running straight from plaza to plaza.
Cite this page Chris Paton, “Temples facing across the plaza on the sun’s path”, The Textbook of Architecture, https://textbookofarchitecture.com/rule/maya-twin-temples. Text, drawings and models licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0.