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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Design 50 profiles: Theaster Gates, Jeanne Gang, Obi Nwazota, Kara Mann et al.
But distance affords a clearer view of the contours of an ecosystem that Gates’ Rebuild Foundation has cultivated—an ecosystem in which one project accrues to another’s value and in which the ordinary indignities of lost things, decrepit buildings or forgotten places return to grace through the sustained lift of a creative, if occasionally doctrinaire, optimism of Gates’ advocacy.
The Africana collection: Norman Teague’s diasporic design
“Africana” is simultaneously a declaration of intent and a perfectly human, warm thing — “comfortable with its Blackness” — and shaped by one body for the use of others. The collection is tactile and tough.
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.
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.
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.
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.