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.
Set the monument on the solstice axis
Orient the principal axis of the monument on the rising or setting of the sun at a solstice, so that the architecture frames it.
The horseshoe of trilithons at Stonehenge opens to the north-east, along an axis that runs out through the entrance of the earthwork and down the Avenue; looking along it one sees the midsummer sun rise, and looking the other way the midwinter sun set between the uprights of the Great Trilithon. At Newgrange in Ireland a “roof box” over the entrance admits the rising sun at midwinter along a nineteen-metre passage to the chamber.
The same impulse shaped later architecture: several Egyptian temples are aligned on solar or stellar events, and in Mesoamerica whole cities were laid out to astronomical bearings.
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
In a megalithic chamber the room can be no wider than the largest slab the builders can raise over it; the upright stones are set to suit the capstone, not the other way round.
Arrange the temple on a single axis (pylon, open court, hypostyle hall, sanctuary) so that at each threshold the floor rises, the roof descends and the light diminishes, until the god’s shrine is reached in darkness.
In a great columned hall make the columns of the central aisle taller than the rest, and fill the difference in height with stone grilles, so that light enters high up over the side aisles.
Give the columns of the tall, clerestory-lit central aisle open papyrus capitals and those of the lower aisles closed buds.
Cite this page Chris Paton, “Set the monument on the solstice axis”, The Textbook of Architecture, https://textbookofarchitecture.com/rule/solstice-axis. Text, drawings and models licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0.