Knossos on Crete is the largest palace of the Minoan civilization and an early moment when architecture moves out of solid mass into multi-storey interior space managed by light and air. If the pyramid is a mass, Knossos is a network of volumes.

The palace rests not on a single symmetrical plan but on hundreds of rooms, corridors, and storerooms clustered around a central court — a clustering that produces the irregular, organic plan that later fed the Greek myth of the "labyrinth." The structural elements holding up the two- or three-storey building are notable. Downward-tapering timber columns (wide at the top, narrow at the base) sit on stone bases. The "polythyron" or pier-and-door partition, with leaves set between a row of stone piers, opens and closes space to create partitions adjustable to the climate.

The real innovation is the light well: vertical voids opened within the building that carry daylight and air from the upper floors down into deep interior rooms — a solution that makes interior space livable within a windowless mass. This is paired with a graded water and drainage system of fired clay pipes. Knossos is thus an early and complex prototype of multi-storey interior space, uniting structure (timber column, stone wall) with environmental design (light, air, water).