A Burglar's Guide to the City (23 page)

Indeed, like Tschumi, Kerbel has an eye for criminality and infiltration. She is most well-known for a project called
15 Lombard St.
, a widely imitated artist’s book that explored what it might take to pull off a bank heist in central London. It was motivated, Kerbel explained to me, by her being, when she made it, a recent arts graduate from Canada living in London and utterly penniless. And, as master bank robber Willie Sutton apocryphally once pointed out, banks are where the money is. Kerbel thus spent several months furtively casing a bank at 15 Lombard Street, noting the layout of the bank itself as well as every detail of its daily schedule. Her observations included when cash deliveries were made and what time of day usually saw the most customers.

Kerbel assembled floor plans, photographs, and timetables. She wrote detailed instructions. Her planned burglary was downgraded to a robbery, however, when she realized she had no believable way to access the bank’s vault. Instead, she devised a fictional but meticulously detailed scenario in which she would intercept the money by holding up a delivery truck outside the bank. Pulling it off—and getting away with the cash—required an exhaustive study of central London’s traffic patterns, of every side street and alleyway, as the design of the city became an unwitting accomplice in her crime.

What remains so interesting about Kerbel’s project—with its compulsive multimedia hoarding of plans and photographs, its vast archive of ephemera generated by obsessive attention to a specific building and its urban context—is that it suggests a world in which illicitly annotated floor plans or carefully traced maps of streets surrounding banks in central London could be traded back and forth like architectural samizdat. These underground publications would then provide their readers with alternative or unexpected guides to everyday buildings. After all, why read a Pevsner Architectural Guide to London or an
AIA Guide to New York City
when you could read a burglar’s guide to the buildings all around you? Somewhere between an architectural handbook and
Ocean’s Eleven
, these would show you not only how to get inside certain buildings but what to do once you find yourself standing in a space you were never meant to access in the first place. Kerbel’s work suggests that thinking about architecture as a burglar would, and understanding different ways of moving through space, bring their own peculiar rewards—even if they are not monetary. Seen this way, even the most mundane or overlooked buildings and cityscapes around us can inspire the same level of wonder and admiration we might normally reserve for international landmarks, such as the Eiffel Tower or the Houses of Parliament.

*

For Randy Smith, a Texas-based game designer and a level architect on the legendary
Thief
games, designing a game environment in order to foreground deeply enjoyable opportunities for criminal stealth, deception, and subterfuge is a complex but rewarding challenge. The
Thief
series, the first of which came out in 1997, is widely credited as introducing the three-dimensional, first-person stealth game. Moving through an architectural interior without being detected was, in many ways, the entire point of the story. The player’s goal was not to kill as many people as possible, but to slip past them unseen and unheard. Sound—or, rather, not creating any—became a central design feature of the
Thief
universe.

During our in-depth conversation about burglary and game design, Smith laughed as he explained, “You would think it was our job to design buildings that are hard to break into, but what we actually want to do is design buildings that will channel the movement of the player along different sequences. We introduce deliberate weak points or blind spots where a player can hide, and we make the guards or the architecture itself do weird things to open up more player opportunities.” This means the guards are programmed to do things that, from a security manager’s point of view, would be completely absurd, such as turning their backs on an important doorway just long enough that a savvy player can tiptoe past. Smith calls these built-in patterns “rhythms of vulnerability.” At first, this might seem relevant only to the world of computer games or burglary fiction, but game play in the
Thief
series is not at all unlike the way security worked at Toys “R” Us, for example, with Jeffery Manchester hidden in the walls, staring at his baby monitor, watching the internal traffic of the store ebb and flow, preparing for his moment of attack.

Smith pointed out how incredibly easy it is for a game designer to create an impossible level or an impenetrable environment—a castle gate that no one can get past, a high-rise no one will ever be able to sneak into. The real challenge is to find just the right level of difficulty so that slipping past the guards and maneuvering through the rooms and corridors becomes enjoyable. This is what he meant when he suggested that game designers need to “introduce deliberate weak points or blind spots” into their environments, such as removing the guards from a room at key moments or creating otherwise unrealistic amounts of shadow at the edge of a courtyard so that a player can walk past without being seen. Real-world scenarios also contain weak points and rhythms of vulnerability—but it often takes the eyes of a burglar, or a cop, to appreciate them.

As fellow game designer Andy Schatz looks at it, however, stealth is not the only or most interesting criteria by which a heist game should be judged. While watching people play his burglary game
Monaco
, Schatz saw that breaking the rules of the game’s architecture was the essence of a successful heist—not sneaking past the guards, but cutting through the walls themselves. He explained this to me in terms of efficiency: “You could say that following a winding path across your lawn is more efficient if what you’re trying to do is keep your shoes clean. The winding path—not the direct path—has different efficiencies and rewards built into it.”

In terms of
Monaco
, he realized, “Spending ten minutes of game time digging a tunnel through a wall in order to get just one coin is not the most time-efficient solution—but, for someone who’s risk averse, if you want to limit your exposure to security guards or limit your risks in attacking the building, then it might actually be the most efficient way to solve the problem.” You just carve your own route from A to B; if there isn’t a door, you make one. Schatz even encouraged this approach to the game—that is, treating the architecture as something to cut through, blast apart, or dig beneath—during an “Ask Me Anything” session on Reddit. He emphasized, “There are secret passages hidden all over EVERY level that any character can access. Try pushing on suspiciously thin areas of wall … Hint: Find any large area of wall and start digging.”

While we were talking about the different architectural strategies that Schatz imagined being used to solve the game’s various heists, he said something that sounded like equal parts Roofman and Bernard Tschumi. “Heist games are largely about repetitive but enjoyable actions,” Schatz said, “and exploring all the different variations that come from them.” This puts a huge emphasis precisely on timing: “The timing on everything comes down to a split second: doing things right and getting away in the nick of time. ‘Is he gonna get caught? The guards are coming into the room—can he get to the window in time?’ That tension typically drives the heist game or the heist movie.”

What this means is that repetition performed across consecutive, often nearly identical heists can become dangerously hypnotic. “You learn how to do something—then you do it over and over again until you get it right,” Schatz said. He could just as well have been describing a serial burglar of McDonald’s franchises as a dedicated player of heist games. That’s exactly why hiding little vulnerabilities and unexpected openings in the architecture itself becomes so important for a game designer. As Randy Smith said earlier, describing his “rhythms of vulnerability,” the outline of a perfect crime is usually camouflaged in the environment—you just have to find it.

*

Schatz’s exhortation to players to move
against
the architecture, not with it, to uncover a scene’s possible crimes, is useful not only in the world of games. Ignoring the paths laid out by architects and even remaking a space from within are some of the most fundamental ways in which burglars misuse the built environment.

Recall our friend jewelry thief Bill Mason. The last time we checked in on him, Mason was scaling the fronts of high-rise apartment buildings on the Florida coast and learning about the inner lives of architecture from maintenance personnel and building superintendents. Now, however, Mason will show us a way past the watchful eyes of security guards, as if using the architectural lessons of
Monaco
two decades before the fact.

During one of his heists, Mason experienced a tactical epiphany: he realized not only that he could but that he needed to change his target building from within. Mason chose a target building based on its perceived weaknesses or security flaws—but that didn’t mean there weren’t ways to make his job even easier once inside. In one of the most interesting moments in Mason’s memoir, he sees that architecture can be made to do what he wants it to do; it’s like watching a character in
Star Wars
learn to use the Force.

In a lengthy scene at a hotel in Cleveland that Mason would ultimately hit more than once in his career, he explains that his intended prize was locked inside a room whose door was too closely guarded for him to slip through. Then he realizes the obvious: he has been thinking the way the hotel wanted him to think—the way the architects had hoped he would behave—looking for doors and hallways when he could simply carve a new route where he wanted it. The ensuing realization delights him. “Elated at the idea that I could cut my own door right where I needed one,” he writes, Mason simply breaks into the hotel suite adjacent to the main office. There, he flings open the closet, pushes aside the hangers, and cuts his way from one room into the other using a drywall knife. In no time at all, he has cut his “own door” through to the manager’s office, where he takes whatever he wants—departing right back through the very “door” he himself made. It is architectural surgery, pure and simple.

Later, Mason actually mocks the idea that a person would remain reliant on doors, making fun of anyone who thinks burglars, in particular, would respect the limitations of architecture. “
Surely if someone were to rob the place
,” he writes in all italics, barbed with sarcasm, “
they’d come in as respectable people would, through the door provided for the purpose
. Maybe that explains why people will have four heavy-duty locks on a solid oak door that’s right next to a glass window.” People seem to think they should lock-pick or kick their way through solid doors rather than just take a ten-dollar drywall knife and carve whole new hallways into the world. Those people are mere slaves to architecture, spatial captives in a world someone else has designed for them.

Something about this is almost unsettlingly brilliant, as if it is
nonburglars
who have been misusing the built environment this whole time; as if it is nonburglars who have been unwilling to question the world’s most basic spatial assumptions, too scared to think past the tyranny of architecture’s long-held behavioral expectations.

To use architect Rem Koolhaas’s phrase, we have been voluntary prisoners of architecture all along, willingly coerced and browbeaten by its code of spatial conduct, accepting walls as walls and going only where the corridors lead us. Because doors are often the sturdiest and most fortified parts of the wall in front of you, they are a distraction and a trap. By comparison, the wall itself is often more like tissue paper, just drywall and some two-by-fours, without a lock or a chain in sight. Like clouds, apartment walls are mostly air; seen through a burglar’s eyes, they aren’t even there. Cut a hole through one and you’re in the next room in seconds.

The irony here is that even someone such as the psychotic, ax-swinging character Jack Torrance from
The Shining
still believes in doors: he hacks his way through the Overlook Hotel by way of preexisting routes laid out for him by others. Even Jack Torrance was too timid, hemmed in by architectural convention and unwilling to question the walls that surrounded him. He should have thought more like Bill Mason. A surreal and altogether more terrifying version of
The Shining
would have been the result, with Jack Torrance hidden somewhere in the hotel, sharpening his ax, unseen—until he comes bashing through the walls again, moving through the building as a burglar would, popping up whenever and wherever everyone else feels most safe.

Nakatomi Space

In an essay called “Lethal Theory” by Eyal Weizman—an Israeli architect and prominent critic of that nation’s territorial policy—we find an inadvertent but spatially extraordinary perspective on the misuse of the built environment. While Weizman is discussing military maneuvers used during the Israel Defense Forces’ high-intensity 2002 invasion of Nablus rather than a bank heist, the spatial techniques used during that operation are so useful for our discussion of burglary that we’ll make a brief diversion.

Weizman describes the movement of the Israel Defense Forces, or IDF, through the city of Nablus as a tactical avoidance of everything we think we know about architecture—that walls are barriers, that doors are openings we’re meant to pass through. The Israeli battlefield commanders decided instead to use “none of the streets, roads, alleys or courtyards that constitute the syntax of the city, and none of the external doors, internal stairwells and windows that constitute the order of buildings, but rather moved horizontally through party walls, and vertically through holes blasted in ceilings and floors.” It was a “three-dimensional movement through walls, ceilings and floors,” he writes. It was an infestation—a choreography that Weizman calls
walking through walls
.