Hierarchical data structures such as irregular pyramids are used by many applications related to image processing and segmentation. The construction scheme of such pyramids is bottom-up. Such a scheme forbids the definition of a level according to more global information defined at upper levels in the hierarchy. Moreover, the base of the pyramid has to encode any single pixel of the initial image in order to allow the definition of regions of any shape at higher levels. This last constraint raises major issues of memory usage and processing costs when irregular pyramids are applied to large images. The objective of this paper is to define a top-down construction scheme for irregular pyramids. Each level of such a pyramid is encoded by a combinatorial map associated to an explicit encoding of the geometry and the inclusion relationships of the corresponding partition. The resulting structure is a stack of finer and finer partitions obtained by successive splitting operations and is called a top-down pyramid.