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.
⸻
Common themes across my work include architecture and landscape, placemaking and public art, community engagement and civic projects, and equity and spatial justice.
See all.
Restoring the Alexander Girard home
Alexander Girard inflected the modernist vocabulary with color, joy, playfulness. He countered postwar ideals of abundance and efficiency with craft objects, misfits in both the worlds of high art and industrial production.
State v. Jahn: the Thompson Center is dead, long live the Thompson Center
What more can be said about the Thompson Center that has not already been said by the legions of its champions and its detractors? That it is a masterpiece, a tour de force of postmodernism? That it is an eyesore out of character with its urban context? That it is monumental in a city resplendent with monuments? That it is a monstrosity? That it is sublimely beautiful? That it is sublimely ugly?
FORTHCOMING | The house that spite built: Abby Beecher Roberts and a lost Jens Jensen landscape
Jens Jensen and Frank Lloyd Wright enjoyed a long and productive collaboration. But by 1937, the two friends were beefing. The cause of their enmity? A project in a remote Michigan town, commissioned by an extraordinary client.