A stone diagram of the cosmos,
built to outlast its makers.
Nine articles on the Big Temple's architectural anatomy — the tower, the capstone, the sand foundation, the sculpture program, the frescoes, the lingam, and the cardinally-aligned walls.
Architecture — overview
Indian temple architecture comes in two great grammars — the curvilinear shikhara of the north and the stepped vimana of the south. The vimana grammar reached its physical and aesthetic limit at Thanjavur in 1010 CE, and never recovered the same scale. Every later South Indian temple is, in one way or another, a response to or a retreat from the Brihadeeswara argument.
What follows is the engineering and aesthetic account of the building. The pieces are the tower itself (66 metres of dry-jointed granite on river sand), the capstone (a single eighty-tonne block lifted to the height of a 22-storey building), the monolithic Nandi at the eastern axis, the dvarapala guardians at the sanctum doors, and the layered frescoes — Chola and Nayak — that survive on the walls of the ambulatory.