Description
Book SynopsisNearly everything we treasure in the world’s most beautiful cities was built over a century ago. Yet the ideas and practices underlying these achievements have been abandoned. Nir Buras documents the humane design methods that held sway before the reign of Modernism and encourages us to relearn the time-tested principles of classic urban planning.
Trade ReviewThis is truly the mother of all urban planning books. -- Léon Krier, author of
The Architecture of CommunityA much-needed and heroic corrective to the grandiose techno-narcissistic dogma that has turned the American landscape into a wilderness of free parking, anxiety, and ennui. Nir Buras's
The Art of Classic Planning presents a new template for a human habitat with a plausible future. -- James Howard Kunstler, author of
The Geography of Nowhere and
The Long EmergencyIn the face of the triple threat of rapid urbanization, climate change, and natural resource depletion, we urgently need to relearn the art of building beautiful and enduring communities, as set out in
The Art of Classic Planning, to ensure future generations can prosper. -- Ben Bolgar, The Prince’s Foundation
A veritable bible of urbanism, Nir Buras’s
The Art of Classic Planning is a formidable challenge to modernist principles. -- Hillel Schocken, Azrieli School of Architecture, Tel Aviv University
This compendium should be understood not as an attempt to constrain urbanism to the classical, but rather to extend the range of urbanism to
include the classical. Why on earth would an urbanist want to be without this trove of knowhow on the table? -- Andrés Duany, FAIA, CNU, recipient of the Driehaus Prize and coauthor of
Suburban NationBuras’ highly intelligent and comprehensively illustrated blockbuster of a book is packed with celebrations of what make beautiful, successful, agreeable environments that people can actually enjoy (and which actually work)…[A] great book. -- James Stevens Curl * Times Higher Education *
Buras unpacks for the reader the embedded wisdom of the previous 5,000 years of city building that carries many a legacy of beautiful places created to meet the aspirations of their community…Clearly outlines the faulty thinking that led to the defacing and abandonment of our cities…Not merely a ‘must have’ book for the old library, it is a once in a generation treatise that contains within its pages the power to heal the world. -- Patrick Webb * Traditional Building *
Buras seems to have been everywhere, and draws on examples from all of these places in demonstrating sound planning from the Maidan in Isfahan in Iran, to Andrassy Avenue in Budapest, to Jai Singh’s plan of Jaipur, to Commonwealth Avenue in Boston. He dedicates significant attention to centuries of planning concepts of every sort of variety…It is a deeply impressive and erudite contextualization of a massive range of material. -- Anthony Paletta * American Conservative *
