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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Philip Barash 10/19/21 Philip Barash 10/19/21

The geography of emptiness

And yet policy and economics fail to fully describe the value of this land, to account for embedded histories and belongings, to recognize that an empty lot is full—brimming with stories and significations.

Philip Barash 10/17/21 Philip Barash 10/17/21

FORTHCOMING | You are not welcome: the difficult politics of belonging on the Tierra Amarilla Land Grant

The politics and ethics of northern New Mexico, half-million acres of Tierra Amarilla Land Grant, are a microcosm of a nation whose attitudes towards land are dramatically shifting.

Philip Barash 10/14/21 Philip Barash 10/14/21

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.

Philip Barash 10/11/21 Philip Barash 10/11/21

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.

Philip Barash 10/10/21 Philip Barash 10/10/21

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.

Philip Barash 10/10/21 Philip Barash 10/10/21

Into Detroit’s backwater

River Rouge follows the city’s westernmost border through marsh, heavy industry, and warrens of postwar housing. It flows far from the showpiece parks of downtown, extreme and remote.

Philip Barash 10/8/21 Philip Barash 10/8/21

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.

Philip Barash 10/8/21 Philip Barash 10/8/21

The ecology of Maya Lin: a memorial for the planet

But celebrity isn’t unambiguous: public visibility means that Lin is continually outing herself—as a woman, as a Chinese American, as an outsider.

Philip Barash 10/7/21 Philip Barash 10/7/21

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.

Philip Barash 10/6/21 Philip Barash 10/6/21

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.

Philip Barash 10/6/21 Philip Barash 10/6/21

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.

Philip Barash 10/5/21 Philip Barash 10/5/21

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.

Philip Barash 10/4/21 Philip Barash 10/4/21

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.

Philip Barash 10/3/21 Philip Barash 10/3/21

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.