Break the long faces of brick walls with regularly spaced shallow buttresses (or recesses), so that light and shadow give scale and rhythm to a material without mouldings.
Rules · Plans · Façades · Stairs · Use
The ziggurat: a solid mountain in stages
Build the temple tower as a solid stepped mass of brick, each stage set back on the one below, with a shrine on its summit and stairs climbing its principal face.
A ziggurat has no interior; it is a platform raised to bring a temple nearer to the god. Ur-Nammu’s ziggurat at Ur (c. 2100 BC) has a first stage about 62 × 43 m and 11 m high, climbed by three stairways (one straight up the middle, two running along the face) that meet at a gate at the first terrace. Its upper stages and shrine are lost and restored after Woolley.
Herodotus saw the great ziggurat of Babylon (Etemenanki) in its late form: a solid tower of eight stages, one on another, with a stair winding round the outside and a resting place halfway up, and a temple at the top: the building remembered as the Tower of Babel.
Related rules
Lay the city out square, walled and moated, with the river through its middle; run the streets straight, some along the river and others across it at right angles, each ending at a gate in the wall along the bank.
Build the temple tower in seven levels on a square base, the first two stages tall and the upper four low, with the god’s house on top, so that its total height equals the side of its base.
base 15 nindan (≈ 90 m) = height; stages 5½, 3, 1, 1, 1, 1 and temple 2½ nindan high
Raise and pave the processional road from the city gate to the god’s temple, wall it on both sides, and build the gate of glazed brick bearing the beasts of the gods, with cedar roofs and bronze-clad doors.
Build the house blank to the street, enter it through a bent passage, and arrange its rooms round a single open court, with the principal room broad and on the south side so that it faces north into shade.
Cite this page Chris Paton, “The ziggurat: a solid mountain in stages”, The Textbook of Architecture, https://textbookofarchitecture.com/rule/ziggurat-stages. Text, drawings and models licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0.