In the American Jungle by Waldo David Frank

What is the meaning of our cities of rectangular streets? What is their effect on our souls? It is plain that Nature likes curves. You may find rough angles in rocky mountain wastes, or in the sort of creature that a microscope makes vaguely visible. But the Nature of man and near to man is a sinuous, rounded being. Think of our bodies and of the bodies of animals-not a Euclidean angle in the lot. Think of the shapes of flowers, plants, trees; of the configuration of the hills and fields; of the sweep of waters; of the globe. Now think of our interior worlds. Our physical dynamo has not a straight line in it. And our mental digestion is tortuous as our intestines. Logic may proceed theoretically like a plummet; but there's nothing natural in such logic. Draconian justice might be called rectilinear, but it, too, does not exist in Nature. Uprightness when it is not tempered by the curves of mercy is repellent. Man's mind moves in curves. His thoughts arch, vault, melt into reverie. Dream and sense swerve into each other. His heart, too, is full of arcuations. And the heart's desires are parabolas. There is naught angular within us. Nor above us. Space, we have learned from Riemann, has a crimp and a curve. The "straight gravitational line" of Newton proves to be the "Einstein shift. " From the detour of solar systems back upon themselves within a spheroid Space, to the devexities of dream, man has a universe full of everything but angles. And yet, the American urbanite has elected to spend his days in a gridiron.

The towns of the Old World were and still are curved creatures. From Iceland to the Cape of Good Hope you will not find an ancient city that does not gyre like a heart or twist like the intestines. Indeed, the European links angles with humanity only in his thought of death. Christ was killed on a cross. St. Laurentius was roasted on a grid. When the fanatical Felipe of Spain built a monastery to express his contempt for life and his withdrawal to the grave, he patterned it after a gridiron.[5]