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.
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.
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.
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.