If the doorâs locked, try the wall
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; itâs 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 thinkâthe way the architects had hoped he would behaveâlooking for doors and hallways when he could simply carve a new route where he wanted it. The ensuing realization delights him. âElated at the idea that I could cut my own door right where I needed one,â 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 âown doorâ through to the managerâs office, where he takes whatever he wantsâdeparting right back through the very âdoorâ 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. âSurely if someone were to rob the place,â he writes in all italics, barbed with sarcasm, âtheyâd 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 thatâs right next to a glass window.â 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 worldâs most basic spatial assumptions, too scared to think past the tyranny of architectureâs long-held behavioral expectations.
To use architect Rem Koolhaasâs 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 burglarâs eyes, they arenât even there. Cut a hole through one and youâre in the next room in seconds.
~ Geoff Manaugh, A Burglarâs Guide to the City
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