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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City guides: Louisville, St. Louis, Detroit
According to lore, the late Lady Charles Perrine stipulated that after his spirit leaves this mortal coil, his ashes be washed down the curb with — what else? — a can of Budweiser. To this day, men of a certain age slow their pace and sigh as they approach the sewer grate nearest Herbie’s entrance.
Designing for the urban sublime: the uncanny as a programmatic motivation in new city parks
The spaces that are most meaningful, the spaces that draw us back time after time, are precisely those that exercise upon us an effect that is irreducible either to the trade jargon of design or to bland entertainment programming.
The new park in the park: musings on Maggie Daley Park
Maggie Daley Park, and others like it, teach the vogue curriculum of creativity and innovation. But the older parks had their own pedagogical approach. They were a Cliff’s Notes of the urban experience, a compressed and variegated lesson in history, social class, real estate economics, race and anatomy.
Some barbarian or another is always at the gate
Design swept the 20th century like an invading horde. It leveled craft guilds and their stratified structures of apprenticeships. It endangered masons and clothiers and ironsmiths and poets by demystifying production. It shattered the idea of the artist, the genius, the creator, the One, in favor of a repeatable universe of objects, images, and places, without an end in sight.
Placemaking in the Loop: art, poetry, and wellness in Chicago’s central business district
Chicago’s downtown organization made its mission to program and activate public spaces. Through art, dance, retail, music, poetry, and innovative partnerships, the Loop transformed into a vibrant and inclusive destination.
What’s out there: Presque Isle
An austere peninsula jutting into Lake Superior, this land had been inhabited by native tribes for as long as 7,000 years prior to the arrival of Jesuit settlers, who named it “almost island.” Deeming the natural landscape “exceedingly interesting, beautiful and picturesque,” Olmsted set the precedent for maintaining Presque Isle in its natural setting.
CHGO DSGN: Chicago Cultural Center
Such is design’s central paradox: at its most successful, designed objects are anonymous and almost entirely imperceptible—part of the texture of everyday life. They are the objects you encounter without remark. But at CHGO DSGN, when plucked from context and installed in a gallery, the everyday object becomes special: as hopeful, as significant, and as erotic as a fetish.
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.
Reston Town Center: updating a legacy commercial district
Reston Town Center is among the most vibrant commercial and entertainment districts in the Washington, D.C., area. But its public and commercial core had started to feel dated.
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.
Echoes of the city: the making of Janet Echelman’s aerial sculpture
When the center dedicated to the legacy of the first African-American President was first conceived, the effort required multiple stakeholders to share a unified vision. A Request for Proposals signaled clear intentions and an ambitious vision.
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.
Between two boxes: the interstitial imaginings of Jimenez Lai
Jimenez Lai’s body of work, from installation art to graphic novels, is not easily categorized. As Lai was designing a pavilion to represent Taiwan at the Venice Architecture Biennale, an exhibition offered a preview and a provocation.
Portraits of Columbus, IN: the many faces of modern design
In postwar America, a hybrid modernism emerged as design was inflected by the patterns of use, the preoccupations, the tastes of the places where it alighted. Columbus is a snapshot of that cultural encounter: the international wave of modernism shifting its shape as it traveled further inland.
Open House Chicago: citywide festival of architecture and community
A free-of-charge festival of architecture and community spaces, Open House Chicago is a highlight of the city’s calendar. The Chicago event reinvented the traditional festival model by partnering with community-based organizations on planning, governance, and public education.
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.