F. Philip Barash works to shape more vibrant and just places.
Through journalistic and narrative writing, I expose stories about the changing American landscape. By facilitating urban planning projects, I contribute to shared places and social infrastructures of communities. And in my public curatorial and teaching practice, I engage contemporary issues that affect the built and natural environments.
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Common themes across my work include architecture and landscape, placemaking and public art, community engagement and civic projects, and equity and spatial justice.
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At the CUSP: saving you, one good design at a time
So great, so enveloping is the ambition of CUSP Conference, that it overtakes us all—designers graphic and industrial, young and old, architectural and digital, those whose methods are orthodox, those whose pants are skinny, and those who, by any other standard, are designers not at all. In an empire of design, everyone turns out to be a designer.
Designer of the moment: Sarah Herda, director of the Graham Foundation and co-curator of the Chicago Architecture Biennial
Sarah Herda set out to become an architect. That she didn’t turns out for the best: a series of high-profile gigs, culminating with the Graham Foundation, have marked Herda’s march toward the intellectual center of design. When the first architecture biennial in North America launches in October, Herda will have finally arrived at her destination.
Notes on public art in the making: the thunder of bunnies beyond the horizon
Movements such as landscape urbanism demonstrate that the scope and ambition of the landscape architecture profession has extended into new realms.
Public spaces define our identity
For all its importance, the public realm isn’t lavished with the kind of attention and funding that private real estate development tends to attract. Paradoxically, the spaces that unite us are often afterthoughts, leftovers from development.
Stakes — and payoff — for Chicago’s architecture biennial are sky-high
The city's image as an architect-maker isn’t just a bit of local lore. It gives Chicago-based architecture firms a marginal advantage when they compete for work overseas. In an international real estate marketplace, being a Chicago firm is shorthand for something important.
Fort / da: notes on metonymic desire, object permanence, and a pair of pleated pants
Long before Lady Gaga told us otherwise, we were not born this way, or that. In an ongoing project of becoming ourselves, we exercised the power of choice and had power exercised upon us, forming our identities by way of gradual accumulation. What we would become depended on a sum of ideas, beliefs, nervous tics, designer pants, sexual partners, allergies, mannerisms, superstitions, friends, and enemies that we were to collect in our lifetimes.
A truck show of the non-monster variety
Below a sign reading “What makes a community great?” answers were densely scribbled in different hands. I asked a high school junior named Marcus Pelt if he'd gleaned any insights. He pointed to a note that said “loving neighbors,” and I thought that it wasn't a bad idea for either a South Side neighborhood or a makeshift, temporary, ragtag caravan of designers.
On the Tarmac: demystifying airport markings across the globe
Tarmac markings are an obscure language that greets us as we glide down toward the earth. It is a code both intimately familiar and radically alien. “On the Tarmac” re-conceives this code.