Dr Nir Buras

An architect and urban design professional, Dr Nir Buras is among a handful of architects and planners who have both classical knowledge and experience in large, complex projects. He is the author of The Art of Classic Planning (Harvard University Press, 2019) and visited 100 cities to write the book.
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Dr Buras has over thirty years of specialized experience in large, complex, and sensitive projects, strategic planning, and architecture and transportation design, as well as teaching and lecturing. His goal is to serve the cities of the world by helping residents to understand their cities to make them more beautiful, healthy and resilient.

He learned his first lesson in urbanism while planning in the Negev Desert in Israel – that modernist planning didn’t work. Mid-career, he had the opportunity to study “why things look the way they do,” and while writing a PhD on modernism, he came out a classicist. Engaged in numerous projects since then, he has researched first-hand how architecture impacts urban planning.

His projects include East Side Access at Grand Central Terminal, New York; International Terminal D, Dallas-Fort-Worth; the Washington DC Dulles Metro line; work on the US Capitol and the Senate and House Office Buildings in Washington.

Working in the 2000s on large urban projects, Dr Buras directed the Anacostia Plan at the open studio of the Washington Mid-Atlantic Chapter of the Institute of Classical Architecture and Arts which he founded. After ten years of applying in practice what he learned, he now presents the urban design and planning method of Classic Planning with the hope of reintroducing beauty to cities.