For my object I've chosen a building - 
Castle Howard. Castle Howard is a country
house built at the end of the 17th
century and located here in Yorkshire.
What matters to me about Castle Howard
is the complexity and ambition of its
architecture. Complicated buildings are
like great ideas - they are conceptually
developed and when they're good they are
rigorously worked through. As such,
complicated buildings like Castle Howard
take us to different places, conceptually
and historically, and that's why we study
them. More specifically, I've chosen the
North front of Castle Howard. This is the
first part of the house that you see
upon arrival. It's the place where the
architect communicates and summarizes
the building that lies beyond.  As such
it's a kind of picture, which is why its
proliferation of architectural forms,
although ostensibly about building,
serve little if any structural function.
The purpose of the façade then, is to
communicate ideas about the building to
anyone who cared to look. We see a
building that celebrates architectural
strength and that aspires to
architectural magnificence. As art
historians we can recover these ideas
and, in so doing, recover a wider set of
ideas about how the complexity of
architecture was understood at specific
moments in the history of art.
