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Architect, educator, and leading proponent of classical architecture, Thomas Gordon Smith, dies at 73

2021-06-30T16:56:00-04:00

Architect and educator, Thomas Gordon Smith, known for his commitment to classical architecture and its contemporary applications, passed away on June 23 at the age of 73.

Smith was a professor emeritus and former chair at the University of Notre Dame School of Architecture. Born on April 23, 1948, in Oakland, California, he attended the University of California at Berkeley, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in painting in 1970 and a master’s in architecture in 1975. From 1979 to 1980, Smith worked as a Rome Prize Fellow in Architecture at the American Academy in Rome. It was here that he became fully committed to the study and practice of classical architecture. He concluded his fellowship with the participation of his design of a façade for “Strada Novissima,” an exhibition at the 1980 Venice Biennale.

Following his studies, Smith established his own architectural practice, Thomas Gordon Smith Architects, and taught at institutions including the College of Marin, UCLA, Yale Un...

Design for Tijuana Cathedral nixed for 'not looking like a cathedral'

2017-06-02T17:44:00-04:00

The architect Eugenio Velazquez has had a tough couple years. Back in 2012, he was jailed for smuggling cocaine from Mexico into the United States. Now, his design for a new cathedral in Tijuana has been shut down—11 years after work first started.

The Archbishop of Tijuana, Francisco Moreno Barrón, cancelled the project because he felt that Velazquez’s contemporary design didn’t look like a cathedral. So now he’s launched a competition for a new, assumedly more traditional, design. It’s open only to Mexican architects, although foreigners are allowed to team up with Mexican ones.

“In its eagerness to be modern, the project does not resemble a Catholic temple, much less a cathedral,” Archbishop Barrón wrote in a statement.

The whole project has a rather dark side to it. While the site was obtained back in the late ‘70s, construction was delayed due to the 1993 assassination of the previous archbishop of Tijuana, Juan Jesús Posadas Ocampo, who was mistaken for a drug lord. And Velazquez...