A wide shot of a ceramics studio, featuring students working with pottery wheels and other tools.
A headshot of SAIC faculty member F. Philip Barash

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F. Philip Barash

Full-Time Visiting Faculty

Contact

Professional Site

Bio

Full-time visiting faculty, Historic Preservation department. Publications: “One More Day in the Life of Jason Pickleman,” Newcity Chicago EXPO Guide, 2024. “To Find Solutions for Chicago’s Ills, Look to Our Communities,” Crain’s Chicago Business, 2024. “Not Your Granny’s Granny Flat,” Chicago Architect, 2023. “Restoring the Alexander Girard Home,” Santa Fe Reporter, 2022. “State vs. Jahn: the Thompson Center is Dead, Long Live the Thompson Center,” Newcity, 2021. “Into Detroit’s Backwater,” Landscape Architecture Magazine, 2019. "Designing for the Urban Sublime: the Uncanny as a Programmatic Motivator,” (with Gina Ford), in Staging Urban Landscapes: The Activation and Curation of Flexible Public Spaces, 2018. “Exploring the Changing Landscape of Public Art,” (with Nina Chase), Building Design and Construction, 2016. “The Ecology of Maya Lin: a Memorial for the Planet,” ArtSlant, 2016. Bibliography: The New York Times, The Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Center for Transformative Placemaking at the Brookings Institution, Architect Magazine. Service: American Planning Association, Vice-chair, Arts and Planning Division. International Downtown Association, Board of Directors. Urban Land Institute, Panel Advisory Services Honorary Association. Education: BA, 2004, University of Detroit; MA, 2005, The University of Chicago.

Personal Statement

F. Philip Barash is an urbanist, writer, and educator. He is the co-founder of the urban planning and placemaking think tank Public Sphere Projects. Through his professional practice, Barash advises governments and institutions on strategies that invigorate public life, honor the character of communities, and enhance shared places. He established guiding principles for the Obama Presidential Center, co-led a transformative public art initiative with the National Park Service, launched a cultural policy effort supported by the Walton Family Foundation, and piloted philanthropic investments into inclusive public spaces across greater Boston.

His writing explores the changing, contested American landscape. Barash served as the inaugural design editor of Newcity magazine, covering architecture, planning, preservation, and related disciplines. His journalistic writing, which appears in publications including Landscape Architecture Magazine and Chicago Architect, exposes stories of forgotten watersheds, underground music venues, and controversial buildings. In addition, his thought-leadership has been featured by The New York Times, Architect Magazine, and the Brookings Institution among others.

Alongside his appointment at SAIC, he regularly lectures and serves as guest critic in the TUDelft Master City Developer program, Boston University’s City Planning and Urban Affairs, and the Harvard Graduate School of Design. Barash is an alumnus of the University of Detroit Mercy and the University of Chicago. He lives and works in Santa Fe, NM, and in Chicago.

Courses

Title Department Catalog Term

Description

The American landscape is carved into an archipelago of exceptions ¿ places that resist the jurisdictional and cultural norms that surround them. If you know how to look, you'll find them everywhere: Barbieland and Burning Man, Idlewild and Wakanda, prepper bunkers and hippy communes, liberated zones and penal colonies. These 'heterotopias,' in Michel Foucault's classic definition, coexist cheek-by-jowl with dominant spatial paradigms, overlapping them, pressing against them, mocking them. Looking out from heterotopias' frontiers, this course will lend critical distance to understanding the normative, seeking to make sense of a complex geography of safety, belonging, othering, and place-based identity. Advanced seminar for historic preservation graduate students centered on a current theme in historic preservation and incorporating relevant theoretical readings. Students lead weekly discussions on issues ranging from authenticity and archaeology to reception theory and commercialization. Actual preservation projects are studied in terms of various theoretical approaches and faculty members' current work.

Class Number

2349

Credits

3

Description

This course will consider a continuum of policies, incentives, and governance models that support arts and culture in place. Students will support community goals by researching best practices in district- and community-scaled arts administration. In consultation with local stakeholders, students will assess community needs and develop models for local and regional arts support. The course will culminate with a presentation of findings to Arts Alliance Illinois leadership.
Partners include: Arts Alliance Illinois, Cook County, Selected communities, Legacy Consulting, Public Sphere Projects
Reading include Arnold Alanen and Robert Melnick, ¿Preserving Cultural Landscapes in America¿; Americans for the Arts, ¿AEP 6¿; Jeff Speck, ¿Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at a Time.¿
Assignments will be both group driven and based upon individual research interests within the overarching topic and in relation to the partner/ client organization Arts Alliance Illinois. Students will prepare initial draft strategy proposal documentation as a group and then based upon review they will develop a specific part of a final project strategy document. While the work will stem from conversations with Arts Alliance Illinois as a 'client' the finished material will be presented 'as live' with the potential for adoption rather than as a live consequential proposal.

Class Number

2410

Credits

3

Description

This course will consider a continuum of policies, incentives, and governance models that support arts and culture in place. Students will support community goals by researching best practices in district- and community-scaled arts administration. In consultation with local stakeholders, students will assess community needs and develop models for local and regional arts support. The course will culminate with a presentation of findings to Arts Alliance Illinois leadership.
Partners include: Arts Alliance Illinois, Cook County, Selected communities, Legacy Consulting, Public Sphere Projects
Reading include Arnold Alanen and Robert Melnick, ¿Preserving Cultural Landscapes in America¿; Americans for the Arts, ¿AEP 6¿; Jeff Speck, ¿Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at a Time.¿
Assignments will be both group driven and based upon individual research interests within the overarching topic and in relation to the partner/ client organization Arts Alliance Illinois. Students will prepare initial draft strategy proposal documentation as a group and then based upon review they will develop a specific part of a final project strategy document. While the work will stem from conversations with Arts Alliance Illinois as a 'client' the finished material will be presented 'as live' with the potential for adoption rather than as a live consequential proposal.

Class Number

2411

Credits

3

Description

One of the most significant sculptors of the postwar period, Richard Hunt left behind a vibrant legacy ¿ and a working studio. Hunt, a pioneering Black artist whose career spanned seven decades, is also an important and beloved figure in Chicago, where his work is displayed in institutional collections and public spaces. Since the early 1970s, Hunt¿s creative headquarters was in Lincoln Park, a converted electrical substation originally built at the turn of the 20th century. The site is now jointly stewarded by the Richard Hunt Trust ¿ which oversees the artist¿s estate ¿ and the Richard Hunt Legacy Foundation which ¿advances public awareness, education, and appreciation of the life and art¿ of Hunt. In cooperation with the Trust and Foundation, this advanced studio course will pursue a dual outcome: first, to document the current condition of the structure and produce architectural and planning studies; and second, to vision potential future scenarios for the former studio, that preserve and interpret the site¿s history.

Class Number

2346

Credits

3

Description

Taken every semester, the Graduate Projects courses allow students to focus in private sessions on the development of their work. Students register for 6 hours of Graduate Project credit in each semester of study.

Class Number

1928

Credits

3 - 6

Description

The Practicum provides structure for engaging in off-campus practicum work based on content and subject matter identified through thesis strategies and in support of thesis studio project development. In consultation with faculty This can include; internships and/or co-operative learning opportunities; experiential and/or focused observational research; service learning and community collaborations. Faculty develop and deliver methodological requirements for the class leading to functional documentary outcomes, that allow students to articulate professional contexts in relation to their thesis work.
Students work from self-identified materials related to their thesis studio work. Typically a student will identify a project accompanied by a bibliography as part of AIA6213 Thesis Strategies.
Students are required to develop a media rich documentary report from their working experience in this practicum. The report is developed in conversation with the faculty and enriched by professional encounters through their project work. The report is built through iterative drafts that are presented and critiqued in the class three times.

Class Number

2403

Credits

3