The Harmandir sits in the middle of a tank, reached by a causeway, with its floor below the level of the surrounding ground and doors on four sides.
Around the parikrama are the Akal Takht facing it, the Ramgarhia bungas with their two towers, the tower of Baba Atal, Dukh Bhanjani Beri, the Ber Baba Buddha Ji, the Ath Sath Tirath, the Central Sikh Museum, the langar hall, and the shaheed ganjs of Baba Deep Singh Ji and Baba Gurbaksh Singh.
The marble and copper were added under Maharaja Ranjit Singh Ji from 1809, and the gold leaf over the sanctum in 1830, which is why the building is called the Golden Temple. Before that it was brick and plaster.
The complex was destroyed and rebuilt several times in the eighteenth century, damaged in 1984, and has been substantially altered by successive renovations, several of which have removed older fabric including bungas and painted work.
The conservation argument about the Golden Temple, between restoration to a devotional standard and conservation of historic fabric, has been running for decades and the devotional standard has generally won.
Baba Atal is nine storeys and the tallest thing on the site, built over the samadh of Guru Hargobind Sahib Ji's son who died as a boy. Its interior carried a full cycle of wall paintings of the janamsakhi episodes, and what survives of them is the largest body of Sikh mural painting anywhere.
The causeway, the Darshani Deori and the parikrama are the sequence, and the design makes a visitor walk down and then across water before arriving. Nearly every Indian temple of the period is approached upward. This one is approached downward, and the doors face four ways, and both of those were decisions.
Almost everything around the parikrama has been rebuilt in the last century, most recently in the Galliara project of the 1980s, which cleared a wide plaza around the complex and removed a great deal of the old city.