New York is a city in three dimensions. Upon the flat grid of European rationality a vertical axis is superimposed, which represents both the crushing weight of power and the soaring spirit of winged victory.

The Norwegian essayist Peter Normann Waage has remarked that American cities have no natural center; they are designed not in concentric circles around a focal point, but as open-ended grids, which may expand endlessly in every direction. In this he sees an expression of the American need for free expansion and boundless space; which he contrasts with the Russian preference for centralized citiscapes clustering around edifices of political power and spiritual authority.

We might surmise from this that Americans and Russians share a deeply rooted distrust of urban life, which they express in opposite ways - Americans by permitting their towns to grade unnoticably into the countryside, Russians by modelling their cities on the tightly knit, authoritarian village. But this is a distortion. Both the rectangles of New York and the Moscow radials are modelled on European ideals, but in both cases something is added to these ideals which changes their significance significantly.

New York does this by creating a vast, three-dimensional grid through which human beings commute and tunnel, rise and fall like an army of ants. Nowhere is the aggregate of human behavior so tangible, the insignificance of each person as opposed to the vastness of our collective endeavours so nakedly visible as here. But while New York flaunts the power of our creations, Moscow hides it. The rational layout of any Russian city is honeycombed by unpredictable passageways, blind alleys and secretive spots with parks and playgrounds. Where is the true center in this maze? Where is the way out, the key to understanding, the cornerstone on which everything rests?

In New York there is only one answer - it is above or below, somewhere along that axis which is inaccessible to earthbound creatures. Likewise, in Moscow the answer lies along a third dimension, which however is not spacial, but temporal - the true meaning of Russia lies buried in time, in the anonymous brutality of history. But in Paris, or in any European city, the meaning is clear for anyone to see. The center is where the palaces, the opera-houses, the great universities, libraries and monuments lie. Everything points to them. There is no doubt in our minds that the power and glory of our culture is manifested in them. Only rarely do we ask ourselves if perhaps the focal point and root force of Europe as well lies outside the crystalline structures of a two-dimensional rationality.