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 10/13/21 Philip Barash 10/13/21

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.

Philip Barash 10/12/21 Philip Barash 10/12/21

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?

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

The state of art with the statesman of architecture: Stanley Tigerman on the Chicago Architecture Biennial

The Chicago Architecture Biennial recently announced a theme for its inaugural year. The theme, “The State of the Art of Architecture,” pays homage to a landmark 1977 conference organized by architect Stanley Tigerman at the Graham Foundation for the Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts.

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

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.

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

Designer of the moment: Sarah Herda, director of the Graham Foundation and co-curator of the Chicago Architecture Biennial

Sarah Herda set out to become an architect. That she didn’t turns out for the best: a series of high-profile gigs, culminating with the Graham Foundation, have marked Herda’s march toward the intellectual center of design. When the first architecture biennial in North America launches in October, Herda will have finally arrived at her destination.

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

Stakes — and payoff — for Chicago’s architecture biennial are sky-high

The city's image as an architect-maker isn’t just a bit of local lore. It gives Chicago-based architecture firms a marginal advantage when they compete for work overseas. In an international real estate marketplace, being a Chicago firm is shorthand for something important.

Philip Barash 10/1/21 Philip Barash 10/1/21

Fort / da: notes on metonymic desire, object permanence, and a pair of pleated pants

Long before Lady Gaga told us otherwise, we were not born this way, or that. In an ongoing project of becoming ourselves, we exercised the power of choice and had power exercised upon us, forming our identities by way of gradual accumulation. What we would become depended on a sum of ideas, beliefs, nervous tics, designer pants, sexual partners, allergies, mannerisms, superstitions, friends, and enemies that we were to collect in our lifetimes.

Philip Barash 10/1/21 Philip Barash 10/1/21

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.

Philip Barash 10/1/21 Philip Barash 10/1/21

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.

Philip Barash 9/30/21 Philip Barash 9/30/21

Open House Chicago: citywide festival of architecture and community

A free-of-charge festival of architecture and community spaces, Open House Chicago is a highlight of the city’s calendar. The Chicago event reinvented the traditional festival model by partnering with community-based organizations on planning, governance, and public education.