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
Lay out the city on a skewed sacred grid
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.
Teotihuacan, at its height around AD 400–550 one of the largest cities in the world, was planned on a grid oriented about 15.5° east of astronomical north along the Avenue of the Dead, with the Pyramid of the Moon at its northern end and the Pyramid of the Sun (about 225 m square and 65 m high) on its east side. Even the river was canalised to follow the grid. The bearing is widely thought to relate to the setting of the sun on particular calendrical days, and it was reused in later sites that looked back to Teotihuacan.
Related rules
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.
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.
Join the great groups of the city by raised, plastered causeways (sacbeob), running straight from plaza to plaza.
Cite this page Chris Paton, “Lay out the city on a skewed sacred grid”, The Textbook of Architecture, https://textbookofarchitecture.com/rule/teotihuacan-orientation. Text, drawings and models licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0.