If the doorās locked, try the wall
[by Geoff Manaugh]
a drywall knife
In one of the most interesting moments in his memoir, [jewelry thief Bill Mason] sees that architecture can be made to do what he wants it to do; itās 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 thinkāthe way the architects had hoped he would behaveālooking for doors and hallways when he couldĀ simply carve a new route where he wanted it. The ensuing realization delights him. āElated at the idea that I could cut my own door right where I needed one,ā 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 āown doorā through to the managerās office, where he takes whatever he wantsādeparting right back through the very ādoorā 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. āSurely if someone were to rob the place,ā he writes in all italics, barbed with sarcasm, ātheyād 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 thatās right next to a glass window.ā 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 toĀ 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 worldās most basic spatial assumptions, too scared to think past the tyranny of architectureās long-held behavioral expectations.
To use architect Rem Koolhaasās 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 burglarās eyes, they arenāt even there. Cut a hole through one and youāre in the next room in seconds.
~ Geoff Manaugh, A Burglarās Guide to the City
@we-are-rogue
The futility of tagging the person you reblogged something from, into your reblog, because you think theyāll like itā¦
On the plus side, I do like it. :D :D :D
Seriously, limiting yourself to the architecture at hand is only if youāre trying to have things go unnoticed for as long as possible.
Otherwise, speaking from a more nefarious moment in my life, locks are only there to deter opportunists, and real thieves will let themselves in however they want.
