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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OlmstedNow: an inclusive vision for the greater Boston Olmsted bicentennial
Frederick Law Olmsted is central to how we think about and use public spaces. Ahead of his bicentennial, ideas about shared places, shared wellness, and shared power are central to a public engagement campaign.
How White City became Black space: notes on Jackson Park
President Andrew Jackson’s legacy—defense of slavery, hostility to abolitionism, violent removal of indigenous tribes—is the exact opposite of the ideals that the park, once known as Lake Park, was designed to demonstrate. And yet it is also a smirking, swaggering irony, for Jackson Park today is no more a tribute to Jackson than a monumental middle finger.
In public: notes from Beacon Street
Times of crisis can have the quality of deepening our perceptions, of revealing that which awaits just beneath the surface. The Emerald Necklace is social mobility infrastructure guised as green space. Beacon Street is a social space hidden in mobility infrastructure. To borrow a phrase from a different radical moment, sous les pavés, le parc.
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.