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.
Rules · Façades · Proportion · Ornament · Walls
Talud and tablero
Build each stage of a platform as a sloping talud surmounted by a vertical tablero: a rectangular panel framed by a projecting border and cantilevered slightly over the slope below; repeat the pair at every stage.
Teotihuacan: tablero taller than talud (often ≈ 1½–2 × its height)
The talud-tablero profile became the signature of Teotihuacan in the first centuries AD and spread with its prestige as far as Kaminaljuyu in the Guatemalan highlands and Tikal. At Teotihuacan the framed panel is heavy and dominant, and it projects over the talud on thin slabs of stone; the panels were plastered and painted, and on the Temple of the Feathered Serpent carved with serpent heads. Other cities used their own ratios and frames, so the proportion of tablero to talud is almost a regional signature.
The profile sharpens a platform’s silhouette with bands of shadow and makes every stage read as a separate horizontal element rather than a continuous slope.
Related rules
To make a small temple dominate the skyline, build a tall crest of masonry on its roof, set over the heavy rear wall and pierced with openings to lighten it; model it in painted stucco with the figure of the ruler or god.
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
Cite this page Chris Paton, “Talud and tablero”, The Textbook of Architecture, https://textbookofarchitecture.com/rule/talud-tablero. Text, drawings and models licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0.