WHAT'S NEW:

Welcome to Cupola.  Hope you enjoy your visit.  If you do, you might want to check back in the future.  Your host, Howard Partridge of Cupola Consulting is always collecting and processing new material, which he will add as time allows.  Feel free to write a note with any comments you have about this site.  Thanks for stopping by.

LATEST NEWS:

Much of the recent site work has involved additions to and refinement of the Cupolas of Capitalism architectural gallery.  In parallel with this has been an ongoing effort to replace all the old pictures on the site.  Your host has adopted a higher quality (and sometimes bigger) picture format as broadband connections have became increasingly commonplace.  The updated photo galleries feature big picture tours with descriptive captions.  Several are already complete, or mostly so.  Among these are the Southwest American Indian Ruins, the Arts and Crafts, Art Nouveau, and the Cupolas of Capitalism architectural galleries.  For aficionados of the feline form, a whimsical, musically-enhanced gallery starring Cupola's clowder is also available now.  Cupola's webmaster plans to revise and expand the other picture galleries to follow a similar format as he finds time.  As you might imagine, he has a domeful of material to process yet, but at least now some of it has made its way online.  A much improved version of the original Cupola Picture gallery will probably follow next.

Your host periodically updates the site links in the Cupola F.A.Q., Cupolas of Capitalism and HotLinks sections to verify that they still work as he states, making adjustments as needed.  Of course, with the sheer number of external site links here,\ several may be offline at any given time.

PREVIOUS NEWS ABOUT THIS SITE:

Cupola first went online on September 18, 1998.  It has grown significantly since then, and now offers more than 800 indexed architectural and arty images.

It is mainly a picture gallery of Buildings, Art, and Landscapes that Cupola's webmaster has visited and photographed over the years.  It includes almost a thousand architectural and arty images.  Some of the subjects that you will find in the galleries include: a study of Cupolas, Domes, and Gazebos, Medieval Architecture, Building Histories and Pictures of American Capitol Buildings, Works by Frank Lloyd Wright, Vincent Van Gogh Paintings, Feline Sculpture, and Picturesque Landscapes and Gardens.

The Cupolas of Capitalism gallery details the architectural history of every working state capitol building in the U.S.A.  It incorporates thumbnail views of most these temples of government, and offers an even more extensive picture gallery of larger, higher quality images (mostly historic ones).

Not everything here is about Architecture, Art, and Nature.  You may also visit the Wordplay Gallery (word games, humor, language oddities), the Autocad Resources, and the HotLinks Section (other sites of note).

The Buildings and Structures section contains hundreds of pictures of historically significant buildings from different time periods and styles.  A label below each image provides information that Cupola has painstakingly gathered about the structure, typically its name, architect, date of construction, and location.  In newer browsers, a brief description of each thumbnail image should also appear as you move your mouse pointer over them.

In general, the galleries contain only places that your host has actually visited.  As a result, some sections are considerably better represented than others.  None are definitive collections of their subjects,  just a personal view of some historically significant buildings and structures.  It is likely that the galleries will grow as new material becomes available.

The Art Gallery section includes some of Cupola's own artwork.  Most of this is rather old.  Some of his more recent workis visible on his developing companion site, Cupola Creations.

This is a graphically intensive site; it is mostly a picture gallery after all.  A concerted effort has been made to maintain a reasonable balance between image file size and quality, so downloads should not be too horrendous, unless the web server gets bogged down or experiencing other problems (please try later if that's the case).  A Site Index is available, which might help those of you with slower connections navigate the site more quickly.  Most of the larger images in the galleries are also accessible via the entries in the secondary site indexes covering the Art, Building, and Landscape galleries.  One may also explore the site via the Search Engine.

In a flagrant waste of server resources, a Revision History is available.  It chronicles of the evolution of the Cupola site from its early days until 2010, when Cupola's practice of posting site updates there came to an end.  It is not the most alluring section of this site.  But it does offer a fun animation and some jazzy musical accompaniment, so you may like to take a look anyway.