The architecture of the Nayak dynasty is mostly of Dravidian style and form. The major architectures which evolved under the kings of the Nayak dynasty who were established with their capital at Madura in the seventeenth century are the shrine at Tiruvannamalai and the Great Temple at Madura. The architecture of the buildings are distinguished by the expansion of the temple precinct which is due to corresponding enlargement of Hindu ritual with specific reference to the spiritual and temporal aspects of the deity.

The immense courtyard surrounding the central shrine was designed to accommodate the crowds who would gather to see the processions, when the gods, like temporal rulers, would be taken from their shrines and displayed to the multitude. The temple grounds are now surrounded by a high boundary wall with enormous portals surmounted by towers located at the principal points. These structures can best be described as rectangular towers, concave in profile and surmounted by hull-shaped roofs of the vesara type. The towers in their immense scale completely dwarf the central shrine within the temple area. These immense structures are covered from top to bottom with a vast number of heavily stuccoed images of the Hindu pantheon.

Within the outer walls of the temple compound there is the central shrine through a network of covered courts and colonnades. The whole idea of this huge complex is to rouse the emotions of the devotee. In the architecture under the Nayak dynasty at Madura the mandapas of the early Dravidian style have been expanded to vast pillared halls. Indeed, the number of individual columns at this famous shrine is more than two thousand. A new element is a tank or basin for ritual ablution surrounded by a columned cloister. For all the innovation of its massive but unsystematic plan, the architecture of Madura, under the Nayak dynasty represented only an exaggeration of already established forms in every detail of its structure, rather than a new development.