By the time I was scheduled to head back into downtown Las Vegas, the sun had set. We had just spent two days sitting indoors with the blinds closed, watching YouTube videos of al-Qaeda kidnappings and sucking down sixteen-ounce energy drinks and chocolate-brownie-flavored Clif Bars. I could escape from handcuffs with my hands behind my back, blindfolded, and I could hide random things in a parking lot so that only I was able to find them the next day. To imply that we all had somehow been transformed into secret agents by this weekend together at a La Quinta would be absurd, yet the urge to double-check all my mirrors for a tail and to engage in gratuitous displays of evasive driving—taking unexpected turns and a much longer, indirect route back to my hotel—was real and hard to resist.
This new sense of power over my surroundings reminded me of a great essay by designer Matt Jones, about pop-culture action hero Jason Bourne. Bourne, Jones explains, moved through a world of densely connected urban environments, cityscapes “that can be hacked and accessed and traversed—not without effort, but with determination, stolen vehicles and the right train timetables.” Jones memorably suggests, “Bourne wraps cities, autobahns, ferries, and train terminuses around him as the ultimate body armor.” The city itself becomes a weapon, a multitool—or, in Jones’s words, “Bourne uses public infrastructure as a superpower. A battered watch and an accurate U-Bahn timetable are all he needs for a perfectly-timed, death-defying evasion of the authorities.” Seen this way, Jason Bourne’s superpower is simply that he uses cities better than you and I; he is the ultimate urbanist, a low-tech master of the getaway.
When I arrived back home in New York, I was carrying a new pair of handcuffs, a lockpicking set, some paracord, a handful of bobby pins, and something of an obsession. I was daydreaming about what I might do if the grid went down—if my wife and I had to enact our own urban-scale getaway—but more to the point, I started wondering what would happen if I decided to put all my burglary research to work.
Subtly, imperceptibly, I found myself becoming attuned to the presence of surveillance cameras and security guards, studying even the people ahead of me in line at my local bank branch the way an anthropologist might take field notes in an exotic locale, noting who seemed likely to resist if I announced a takeover robbery or how I’d get out of the bank and, if I managed to, what I’d find out there on the street. I noticed that the traffic light outside was timed, for example, and that someone could use it as a metronome or stopwatch to schedule a burglary; one could flee just as it was about to turn through its next cycle, using Manhattan’s in-built traffic patterns and pedestrian rhythms as a screen for a getaway.
One afternoon while taking a break from work, I was standing in line at the ATM when two police officers walked into the bank lobby behind me. I remembered, as soon as I saw them, that I still had my handcuffs, lockpicks, bobby pins, an emergency glass-breaking device, and, on that specific day, a heavily underlined copy of Confessions of a Master Jewel Thief by Bill Mason stuffed into my backpack. I suddenly felt nervous. What would happen if I was targeted for NYC’s infamous “stop and frisk” campaign or, worse, if I reached into my bag to retrieve the checks I was about to deposit and a jumble of handcuffs and lockpicks spilled out onto the marble bank floor? Surely this weird assemblage of tools—I was standing inside a bank!—would constitute “intent”?
It had become so normal to travel with this stuff—to walk around New York with criminals’ memoirs and burglars’ tools in my bag—that I had forgotten I even had them in my possession. It was so easy to convince myself that everyone else was thinking like this—that every building represented a puzzle to solve or an obstacle course to break free from—that I’d lost sight of the peculiarity of my recent investigations.
Pretending to be looking for something, I pushed the lockpicks aside and shoved my handcuffs farther down in the bag. By the time I was done depositing checks, the police had walked out the door, and I was free to get away however I wanted. I chose the subway.
7. BURGLARY REQUIRES ARCHITECTURE
While I was writing this book, my in-laws were burgled. The small suburban house in which my wife grew up, in the leafy world of culs-de-sac and roundabouts southwest of London, was broken into by what was later determined to be a group of fourteen-year-olds. They were never caught.
The temptation in writing a book like this has been to root for the underdog, to crown an unexpected spatial antihero who, as my evidence would show, had simply been misunderstood all along. The burglar is just a person—no, a genius!—who happens to use his or her talents in a morally troubling way. But we shouldn’t hold illegality against them—indeed, we should hold that for them, I thought I might argue, because we would never have discovered the true potential of the built environment had it not been for someone willing to break the rules. In fact, we should celebrate the burglar, this new archetype, this devil in the details of the built environment, a mythic figure who shows us what architecture, all along, could really be and, more important, how we should have been using it all along.
But that is too simplistic an inversion, and the upside-down ethics of a position like that quickly become impossible to sustain. Burglars, as we’ve seen—and as you probably already suspected from the beginning—are not supermen or wonder women, dark lords of architectural analysis. To say otherwise, even with some of the extraordinary stories we’ve read so far, would be absurd. Burglars are not always stupid—again, think of all we’ve read, think of all we’ve learned—but for the most part, if you’ll pardon my French, they’re assholes. They wreck the lives and security of others for as little as a necklace—often far less—leaving psychological scars no insurance policy can cover.
You hear the same thing, over and over: that being burglarized can destroy any feeling of trust or safety a person might have, replacing it with a crushing, near-omnipresent sense of paranoia about your friends, your family, your next-door neighbors. Those kids up the street. The local FedEx driver. The guy who fixed your refrigerator last week. Your building’s new cleaning crew, who have their own keys to the downstairs lobby. That friend of a friend who came around for drinks one night—didn’t he specifically comment about the very thing that got stolen? Had he secretly been casing the place? You can’t trust anybody—or at least you struggle to try. Irreplaceable family heirlooms are sold for fifty dollars on eBay—a fraction of their value—which is then probably blown on drugs or strippers. On beer and cigarettes. Your hobbies and habits led you out of your house at certain times, until a total stranger—or a dishonest friend—took advantage, slipping into your patterns like Roofman, when the rhythms of vulnerability were just right. These were the inner details of your life: studied, dissected, peeled open, used against you.
What is there to celebrate in this, or to be spatially thrilled by? Something so pointlessly destructive, often done on a whim, for a rush of adrenaline, on the spur of the moment, to sustain some idiot’s high? Seductive visions of Cary Grant slinking across rooftops in To Catch a Thief are replaced by the sight of underage gang members too stupid to know what your jewelry’s really worth. In his canonical work of eighteenth-century legal theory, Commentaries on the Laws of England, Sir William Blackstone points out that burglary is considered so invasive, so offensive to the idea of private dignity and public order, that burglars fall outside the sphere of legal protection and deserve death. Burglary, he explains, “has always been looked upon as a very heinous offense; not only because of the abundant terror that it naturally carries with it, but also as it is a forcible invasion and disturbance of that right of habitation which every individual might acquire even in a state of nature; an invasion, which, in such a state, would be sure to be punished with death.” Can all those bank tunnels and well-sawn holes in hotel walls, all those annotated floor plans and cool tools, cancel that out, offering something so aesthetically and strategically interesting—everyday life transformed into a thriller, even if you’re the victim of the crime—that we’re somehow meant to forgive the world’s burglars?