And that's one of the things that's so interesting about Burglory is that this is an architectural crime. It's about looking at buildings and specifically buildings and trying to find ways to, as it were, solve them. Welcome to Archonect sessions one to one. I'm Amelia, and this week I'm speaking with writer and building blog founder Jeff Mannau.
About his latest book, A Burglorer's Guide to the City. It's definitely the first book I've come across, classified jointly under both architecture and true crime, full of fascinating insights into how Burglorer's exploit architecture to commit the perfect crime, and the extent architects will go to prevent that from happening. This June we're exploring issues of privacy on Archonect. So I was eager to talk with Jeff about the book and how it's changed his perspective on the built environment.
Jeff Mannau, thank you so much for joining us on the podcast to talk about A Burglorer's Guide to the City. There's so much in this book of dissertations to different cities and talking to different either reformed or pseudonym burglars about their experience with architecture and breaking into it. But I wanted to ask to start out if there was a particular instance either personally with a burglary or engagement with security that made you start thinking about how architects might be able to have a particular perspective on the built environment around Burglory. Sure, yeah.
I mean, I guess I would say that the most interesting sort of personal experience of Burglory actually came while writing the book. So it didn't inspire the book. It actually happened about midway through, which was when my wife's parents got broken into in their home in suburban London. And so that was really interesting not only to see the kind of emotional effect it can have on people but also that it led to some pretty intriguing conversations with the local police over there in England about how they not only investigate these kinds of crimes but also the types of advice they give to homeowners for security, keeping your home kind of burglar proof as it were or at the very least deter people from breaking into your home and not others.
And that led to some pretty interesting conversations about design the built environment and even the role that police try to take in suburban England for guiding the built environment along certain paths. But I guess I say that my interest in the kind of the motivation to write the book itself wasn't so much a personal experience of Burglory but was really just a fascination with the notion that what's interesting about Burglory is that it can't exist if you don't have architecture. So if there are no buildings, there are no burglars. So it's a crime that is really intimately connected to the built environment.
And there's just something really, really fascinating about that for me that as we design structures, whether they're offices or hotels or private homes, we're inadvertently creating this world that allows burglars to exist. And so this entire criminal class, this entire field of criminal investigation only exists because of the built environment. And that was something that I thought really deserved an architectural focus. So just seemed like a most obvious crime to write a kind of architectural guide to.
So I guess you get things in some ways that's like an architectural guide to Burglory as much as it is a Burglory's guide to the city. And I love that in the course of the book, you talk to a bunch of FBI agents around who specialize in this kind of crime. And one of the particulars of the crime is actually listing what constitutes the architecture of Burglory, like what different structures can be said to have been burglar or burglar. And how say one of the examples is an inhabited but absent houseboat as opposed to just a floating shack on the water.
So you cut into this interesting semantic differentiation between what is actually viable architecture for Burglars and for that crime to be committed in versus just any type of thing that hasn't yet. Has yet to be classified and which also brings up these interesting notions of private space versus public space and what interstitial areas are then taken advantage of by Burglars to access that private space. So of course, if you're writing this book, you're going to get these glasses on and you're going to start seeing everything in your own built environment as kind of around these ideas as well. Okay, how could I break into that?
What would be the various vulnerabilities there? Could you make kind of like a comment around from the beginning of the research for the book and like now has there been some kind of development in your own perspective of just sharing of looking at the built environment as a burglar? Do you think you've gotten better at burglar in the city? Yeah, I mean, I definitely think that it's pretty impossible to do this type of research for this amount of time and to meet these kinds of people and not have it somehow affect the way you look at the city.
So I definitely do notice details that I don't think I would have paid attention to a couple years back. So in particular, when I visit friends homes or if I go back to see family looking at little details, whether it's the proximity of a tree branch to a window on the second floor or just simply the sliding doors in the back that lead out to a patio, etc. That I'm now noticing as kind of these vulnerabilities that I wouldn't have seen otherwise. But as far as the actual even the city itself, I think that is something I'm not going to necessarily say I would be a better burglar now because I'm not having a burglar in the past.
I don't know necessarily that I would improve upon that absent history of burglar. But I do think that I'm now looking at everything from transportation infrastructure to where storms to where networks go, whether or not they go underneath banks, even to things like learning that a bank is near an underground stream or that kind of thing. And instantly that really captures my imagination as far as sufficiently advanced burgery crews really take advantage of that underground waterway and use it as a route into the bank from below, which is actually partially what happened with an unsolved crime in Los Angeles. In the 1980s where this crew took advantage of the city's hydrological infrastructure to commit a really pretty spectacular bank house.
But yeah, it's really hard not to see that. As far as it is, it's an inspiring need to break into buildings. I mean, at least for the time being, I'm able to resist that temptation. No longer a method of trying to write this as an architecture slash true crime book that you can have the actual personal experience of going through as well.
Well, going back to the instance of your wife's parents house being broken into what kind of advice were the police giving the owners of the home to kind of forward off that possibility in the future. Yeah, I mean, I guess on the most straightforward level, I mean, the people got in through the back door, which in that case was a sliding glass door leading out to a small suburban backyard. And the problem with those types of doors is that they're extremely easy to get off of their tracks and then effectively kind of pull them out of the way and then sneak in. So even if they're locked, you can still get them kind of jimmy them out of their tracks.
So they're pretty unsafe doors in the first place. But what's interesting about it though is that there's kind of like a calculus that you can do in terms of how risky your house might be, including the neighborhood you live in. And on one level, the irony was that their house was actually quite well designed for that and for safety. So it was in a pretty quiet, leafy neighborhood where the houses are quite close together.
The neighbors all know one another. It's on a cul-de-sac, which is usually a good thing for not getting burgarized because a burglar doesn't want to get trapped at the end of a cul-de-sac. If they've driven out there or they only have one line of flight as it were, if they can only get away by going through the back through the police who might show up to close off that cul-de-sac, they're not going to have very much luck there. And on top of it, they had a pretty busy road right by.
So there's lots of people driving by and where they would have seen the burglar, etc. But there were a couple other little things that didn't work in their favor, which was that they had a pretty dark backyard. They had a lot of old shrubs and trees that gave a pretty good amount of visual privacy. So while that's really good, obviously when we're visiting there as a family, we just want to hang out and not be seen by the neighbors.
That's pretty bad from the point of view of letting you're giving the burglar's privacy as well. And so they were able to just slip in. And then ironically, the other thing is that they're quite close to public transport. So there's just a regional light rail that comes out to the suburbs and then goes down back into London and then hooks up with the subway system, etc.
That was actually, they never did arrest the people who did the burglary, but they assumed actually that because of the way it was committed, it was part of this crime wave that has been involved with teenagers riding public transportation out from the city to the suburbs and hitting houses and just getting right back on public transport and going into town. So you can make of that what you want if you wanted to say that public transport is a security risk or that kind of thing, which is obviously not the theory that I would be pushing. But nonetheless, that contributed to the ease with which these teenagers were able to get out to the suburbs and hit the house. So there is no cut and dried way to universally say that a place is now totally secure.
There's only a series of sort of checklists that you can go through to try to mitigate the danger of being broken into. But even just one little thing, it can just be that a light bulb goes out on the back porch and that is enough to give someone cover to break into your house. There can be one little chink in the armor. And then next thing, you've got strangers right through your drawers as it were.
So it's a complex but interesting process to go through and trying to decide what house safety really are. And it also brings up that frustrating reality that no matter how well prepared you are, the damage that random teenagers can do just without necessarily being this criminal mastermind can bring up unanticipated ways of breaking in that you logically would never think of it. But the fact that it's just some random teenagers that that kind of brings in this kind of X-factor that you just can't anticipate, which of course can encourage you to be even more paranoid in the course of trying to get secure. But you also bring up in the book to the point of public transportation and various getaways because of course you can do the crime but how do you get out of it?
If you can't get out of it, the crime isn't done. So in the case of Los Angeles, there's this wonderful kind of, I wish there's some metaphorical truism built off of it. But that LA is kind of a heady place for bank robberies simply because there are so many freeways. So the getaway is easier.
You can get to go to a bank near a freeway interchange and just get on your way. I was wondering what other kind of infrastructural models or infrastructural styles that kind of encourage certain types of burglary. What's interesting, there's a lot of different things that factor into that. I mean, entire neighborhoods can be more susceptible to crime if you have, for example, very gridded, very regular streets with very similar house plans being built.
So that maybe it's an older development that was all built at the same time and there's only four or five house plans that are used throughout the neighborhood, maybe some of them are mirrored or that kind of thing. So that there's slight differences, but fundamentally you're dealing with the same kind of place. Once a burglar gets familiar with that neighborhood and once they know their way around it, because after all, it's a really easily navigated grid-based development, then they're not going to have very much trouble becoming very familiar with it. They'll know exactly what direction to turn, how to get out of the neighborhood, etc.
And on top of that, because the floor plans are all the same or similar at least, they can be extremely comfortable with breaking into certain kinds of houses. And so you might inadvertently find that you, by living in a certain plan that you are actually more at risk now if you hear that somebody up the road who lives in a similar house has been broken into, that should raise some alarm bells I think for you in terms of whether or not someone is becoming familiar with the type of house plan that you live in. But so, yeah, I mean, it can also scale all the way up to one of the interesting things was talking to the LAPD about some of the richer neighborhoods up on the Hollywood Hills that like to think that they are pretty, not immune to burglary, but they, there's an ineffective deterrent, which is that you've got these really tight winding roads that make it difficult to escape at high speed. You also never know who's right around the corner if you're going to get blocked in, if there might be a police officer responding in a car.
And on top of that, it's very easy to get lost. So if you don't know the neighborhood very well, you're not going to necessarily know if that left turn you take is leading to a dead end or maybe wrapping back around up to the top of the hills or that kind of thing. But the irony is that also for the police, they too can get thrown off by those kinds of layouts. And so the same thing that would benefit or rather would dissuade a burglar from hitting a neighborhood is also going to give police officers pause because they don't necessarily know exactly how to get up to a house.
They don't know if they do might get blocked in, if they make a wrong turn or how to follow with the burglars, if they are trying to get away, et cetera. And you can even kind of find these sorts of vulnerabilities that prevent police from doing their job all the way up to whole neighborhoods. Like a great example that I gave in the book is that even the streets around Los Angeles International Airport are becoming known as a kind of hiding spot for criminals because the LAPD airport division can't always get permission to fly near the airport. And so because of that, you know, you can get chased by helicopters all over the city, but the minute you get towards the airport, the police have to hang back.
And so they can lose visual identity of, you know, they can no longer track you. And then it becomes very easy to just, you know, pull under a bridge and switch cars or disappear into a parking lot or get out of the car and run off. And if there isn't a, you know, ground unit right behind you, that's a pretty effective way to get away and abandon the vehicle that you were in, especially if it's a stolen car. And so what I think is interesting about that is that there's an entire neighborhood then that because of the method of police surveillance, which is the helicopter, that neighborhood becomes an inadvertent blind spot for the police.
And so I think that's a pretty fascinating example of infrastructure and even international transportation infrastructure having an effect on the shapes of getaway routes in the streets below. Yeah, that's absolutely fascinating, especially because the helicopters in Los Angeles are seen as kind of the, you cannot escape us. That's sort of how it's taking. And within that, especially in regards to the planned communities and having this vulnerability, if you know that a similar house to yours has been broken into previously, it seems like an inherent argument against any type of cookie cut or suburban development or any type of development that relies on any type of generalist for plan that is easily replicable.
So you would want to kind of build in as an architect, I wouldn't say necessarily false leads or like dumb kind of like ways to trap people specifically, but you would want to build in that level of uniqueness that would allow for that kind of frontline of defense that even if you had known that this had been targeted before, that a similar building had been targeted before that you would already provided for that. And you do bring up architecture education in the book, which I find really interesting is that like you kind of an encouragement for architectural students and people who are working in architecture, and from the academic sense, to have more of this mindset or at least to as an academic exercise put on the glasses of a burglar to see the city in a new way and look at buildings in a different way. Do you think there's a real appeal here for architecture education to change in a certain way given the things you've learned from researching the book? Well, I do think there's a couple things that would be really fascinating to see more of in architectural education in terms of this sort of research.
And I guess I'd say there's two ways to look at it. One is that, you know, one of the tragedies I guess you could say of architectural security these days is that it tends to just be left up to the business of the business. Or homeowners to figure out later. And so, you know, architect will build whatever kind of shaped house they want or whatever sort of building that seems or most appropriate.
And then they just assume that someone else will come along and install a burglar alarm or a motion detector or they'll put bars on the window or they'll do whatever sort of aftermarket solution they have to in order to make that shape more secure. But what I think is unfortunate about that is that that means that ironically you end up with these very heavily fortified looking structures like driving around Los Angeles where you see bars on windows and you see steel doors on front of even Victorian houses. And you see what appear to be almost, you know, fear the walking dead levels of fortification. But, you know, if those were to have been considered from the very beginning by the original architects, you know, you can find more interesting ways to solve the problem of ground floor windows, for example, and the fact that somebody might try to break in through them or windows on the second floor that somebody might try to climb up and break into the bedroom or that kind of thing.
You can find different ways of designing those details that would actually allow for a more elegant solution to the security question. And so what I think is interesting is I think a lot of architects sort of shy away from the question of security because it's kind of ideologically contaminated. It sounds like you're trying to militarize the environment or you're wanting to live inside a kind of fortress Los Angeles type thing, which is, you know, fortress LA is my Davis's term for the obsession with personal security in greater Los Angeles. But I think that I already there and what that misses is that if architects were in fact to get involved from the very beginning, they would actually help prevent that kind of heavily fortified looking environment from existing because they would find better and more elegant solutions for the types of things that we now rely on just sticking bars on our windows or installing burglar alarms.
And then the second thing that I think is really interesting is that if you look at this not from the point of view of committing crimes, but simply from the point of view of how people interact with and use architecture is kind of like studying desiring paths across parks where you realize people deviate from the official path. And actually walk across the grass following their own diagonal lines or they follow shortcuts from one route to another. And if you look at that from an architectural point of view, you realize that perhaps people have always wanted a more flexible relationship to their surroundings. And so, you know, for every teenage fantasy of being able to slip out of your bedroom through the window and climb a tree trunk down to the ground and sort of slip away into the night to meet your friends somewhere.
You know, that's an architectural fantasy. And if you look at that from the point of view of how could you make that sort of thing more officially designed into a structure, then I think it would be interesting to consider the fact that people want more flexible interiors. You know, I kind of use the example sometimes of Japanese vernacular architecture where you've got sliding paper walls that make a room, you know, a wall turn into a door and a door turn into a wall with a flick of a wrist. And I think if, you know, if architects were to look at how they could find that level of flexibility and interaction and to learn the way that burglar from the way that burglar is trying to interact with architecture, they might come up with some really intriguing ways to design interiors and even ways into and out of buildings, that would be really much more playful and exciting.
I think you would learn that from studying burglar. And you bring up the kind of frustrating situation currently where the security question comes after the architecture and often gets given to a technological solution, like, well, we can just apply many types of security cameras or will reinforce this in another way other than explicitly from architecture. And I think that the book does a good job and there's kind of two envelopes here of security, one being the physical actual structure and the other being the various threats and possibilities inherent in the smart home of having this technological advent of everything in your home be connected to your own personal security system to theoretically create a more secure environment, but of course, also with the more connections that you have, the more vulnerabilities you have that, of course, none of these things are entirely secure. And we've seen so much kind of cynicism and optimism around any type of smart home appliance or such and how that changes the relationship for the individual living in a domestic space between private and public and access and security.
And one of the particular projects that we've been looking at recently in regards to doing a editorial theme for the month of June about privacy and looking to this house or this rather project by Space Caviar called Ram House, which is basically, you might be familiar with it. And a more or less two story, very simple house like structure that is entirely encased in a fair day cage. And so the idea being that not only are you secure against any type of physical access or physical trespassing, but that certain other parts of the electromagnetic spectrum that might otherwise permeate your privacy, such as any type of virtual surveillance would be also potentially cut off. But that on top of that, you would also be able to decide at what level of access you would want to the both the electromagnetic spectrum to come in.
So not just, you know, tin foil hats, but also whatever you would want to access visible light or radio waves or such, while at the same time having that level of physical security of just being inside a structure. So I'm wondering if you could now kind of base on the research in the book and what we're talking about about transformable spaces and such. Do you think that there's some kind of a closer ideal for a more secure space or to say at least a more defended against burglary space in something that is actually transformable that you can move around that is flexible as opposed to fortress, you know, fortress like LA or something more stable. Yeah, I mean, I think that's an interesting question.
I think that in a sense you're talking kind of about a soft defense as opposed to the kind of hardening of a heavy fortress like response to burglary. So, you know, sort of transformability or moveability or flexibility of an interior. I do think actually would be an interesting way to offer security that is especially a kind of unpredictable level of security. And I mean, unpredictable from the perspective of a burglar where you're never necessarily sure once you break into a building, you know, exactly how things are laid out or whether or not certain rooms are where they appear to be or for that matter, whether not different smarts own home systems are either switched on or even electrimagnetically available because of, you know, a variable fair day cage effects that you could have in the interior of a building.
So I do think that that would be something that you could do. You know, interestingly, there's, I suppose you could probably find some interesting analogs and precedents for this throughout architectural history where, you know, even in the design of things like the old fortresses and castle keeps and even the castles themselves of the Middle Ages, you know, you would find interesting spatial solutions like baffles, which are where tiny hallways where when you first entered a structure, you were forced to turn right or left and to remain in single file and to kind of navigate these tiny little hallways before you actually got into the structure proper. And so the idea of being baffled, so to speak, by the architecture so that you were disoriented but also vulnerable to the people who own the house or ran the castle. I wonder if you could do kind of update that for the 21st century and do sort of electromagnetic baffling or some other method of entrance where by going into a house, you're immediately sort of thrown off your guard, you're not necessarily sure where you are and also rooms don't necessarily lead to the places where you thought that they might.
But yeah, I think that those combining this kind of research like the electromagnetic research of things like the RAM house or just general smarts that are receiving smart house security and combining that with the physical layouts of buildings and even the materials used to construct them could lead to some really, really interesting architectural experiments and that goes back to your earlier question about, you know, what might this do in architectural education. And I think that all the stuff we're talking about would really, really be interesting in a design studio scenario where you're working with the freedom to experiment with this kind of stuff and treat it as a design brief for students to play with what security really is and how to achieve it both through hard and defenses but also this kind of soft transformability. Yeah, and I think that brings up a kind of distinction between different types of privacy that are being protected in any case of security is that you want privacy as in private space simply that is just a scene as a human need and desire to have a space that is private for the individual regardless of what inherent value is contained within that space. It's not simply just a bank vault that keeps expensive and valuable things safe but simply you have a space for your own person to have for your own individual privacy and then second second to that nature of privacy is you have privacy of information of stuff that is actually not necessarily contained physically but has some type of personal property attached to it and that you feel you need to protect in some way.
And one of the things you bring up in the book is from talking to these two FBI specialists who build so called capture houses, which I found really fascinating and such an obvious thing but basically these sting homes fake environments that are built by the FBI to appear particularly tasty to potential burglars and then basically tempt them into the space and capture them. Can you tell me a little bit about like your experience talking to the FBI about these homes and for these spaces and how they would go about designing them? Sure, in this particular case, it's actually the British police as opposed to the FBI that it's otherwise it's exactly what you're describing which is that it is a program that was really kind of kicked off in Northern England in the, I guess that's like the late 90s or early 2000s I think if I remember the dates correctly. But the notion was that as you described that they had a particular burglar or maybe a burglary crew operating in a city and they really needed to get these people off the street.
So often you'll find that the statistics for a neighborhood, the crime statistics can be skewed even by just one person. So there's an active burger in a neighborhood in New York City, for example, and that could lead to that neighborhood having skyrocketing burglary statistics. But if you just get that one person off the street, then the neighborhood goes back to the sort of base levels that's for the rest of the city. And so what they try to do is reverse engineer the kinds of kind of like a honey pot, so a trap that would appeal to that particular criminal.
And so that's the notion of the capture house. So it's actually the spaker partner that they will fully furnish. They'll have it make it, they'll make it look as if someone does in fact live there that maybe the homeowner has just stepped out for the evening and they'll have something like a digital camera on the kitchen table or they'll put an iPad on the counter or maybe a laptop on the nightstand and just leave it there with, you know, with a light turned on and maybe a window cracked open. And then they will wait.
And so if they do it right, then it'll fit perfectly into what this kind of burger has been looking for all along, which is that they hit say second four apartments that have left the window open and they steal electronic goods. And so this is exactly what that burger is looking for. And sure enough, they found actually that these things can be successful within even 24 hours of opening them, which is really extraordinary. Although sometimes they've gone more than a year and no one has ever broken into it.
But even there, what I think is interesting about that is that it implies that, you know, if you live in one of these cities in England and a capture house program has now really pretty much extended throughout the country, you know, that empty apartment across the street that you've always wondered who lives there because you never see anybody in their peers to be a digital camera sitting out on the table. And no one ever turns the lights out. You know, in fact, that might be a kind of police surrogate. You know, it's this parallel world run by the cops and they're just waiting for someone to step in to be captured on camera and to swoop in and bust them and arrest that burglar.
But I love this notion that there's this kind of other world hidden in plain sight run by the police and it exists as these kind of replicant houses. You know, it sounds like a police program, you know, from a science fiction novel. And the fact that that's a real method of trapping or capturing as a word burglar is really fascinating. It's also shows that design innovation, I suppose you can say, doesn't only happen on the side of the law breakers in terms of the burglars who are trying to find creative ways to get past security.
But in fact, there's a level of design thinking and ingenuity on the side of law enforcement that I think is really quite fascinating that I tried exploring the book as well. It fits perfectly with the practice of an early one of the kind of famous burglars that you talked about at the beginning of the book who managed to create full-scale replicas in empty Brooklyn warehouses of the bank vault that he would later break into and stage elaborate actual practice sessions of breaking into these places insofar as putting the desk furniture around the safe in the way that it would be in the actual bank and running blindfold tests with his crew to make sure that every step was perfectly placed. And you see an obvious skill set here that would be applied equally effectively in the criminal area or in the security area. Did you come across figures who in the course of researching that kind of either towed that line or kind of switched over from one to the other?
Yeah, I mean, the person that you mentioned was really fascinating in that regard. That was a guy named George Lee at Nidas Leslie who was actually trained as an architect. And so, and he was quite good. He graduated with high honors and he was from a well-to-do family.
So he could have really kind of done anything he wanted to professionally in terms of practicing architecture. And you know, but when he moved to New York City, you know, rather than use his skills to create new buildings, he used his skills to break into existing buildings. And so I think what's interesting about his career was that, yeah, everything that they did as a bank robbery crew and they were behind 80% of all the bank crime in America at the time was that it was so architecture was so central to what they did. So it was central to how George Lee and Nidas Leslie case the buildings that he got into.
It was central to what he would do to research them, including sort of talking his way into seeing building plans and then of course building these replicas and these surrogates and then practicing on them was a fundamentally architectural undertaking as well. And so it really was architecture enlisted as a way as a means for breaking and entering, which I think is pretty fascinating. But there was another individual who I spoke to while writing a book who was a guy up in Toronto who was, you know, he claimed to be a retired or reformed burglar. I suppose you could say, but it was pretty interesting because talking to him made that seem like perhaps he wasn't all that past the coming part of his career.
But what was interesting is that now he actually works in the private security field. So in a sense, he kind of did a reverse to the Nidas Leslie where he had come up with some really, really interesting and incredibly creative means of targeting buildings in Toronto. And then he moved to the other side of the law to now become a security professional. And I think what's interesting there is that obviously, you know, the people who know how to break into your building the most efficiently or obviously the people who also would be the best at helping you protect yourself from those kinds of people.
And so that was kind of the direction that he took his career in. But, you know, briefly, obviously that, you know, some of the things that he explained I think were really fascinating. You know, one was that he became so familiar with the fire code of Toronto that he actually used it to help him choose which buildings to break into because he could tell from the position of emergency fire stairs inside building cores and where those emergency exits opened out to one of the streets, everything from the distance that an apartment door would have to be from those emergency escapes inside so that he could know maybe how many apartments there would be on each floor, where they would be located, how far he might have to run. For example, if he had to quickly get out of an apartment and take the emergency fire stairs, but he was able to extrapolate from the fire code of the city itself, the kinds of buildings that he might target.
And I think that's really fascinating as well that there's this vulnerability that's actually in place to protect us, you know, is there to make sure we don't die in a house fire. Or building fire. And yet if you look at it from the right point of view or as it were the wrong point of view, you know, you can use that to violate the security that people around you. But he was also even, you know, pointing out that a lot of architectural information that we think of as pretty neutral is increasingly available online.
And so you might even have found that if you Google your own address, you can often find that you'll get hits back to sites like Zillow.com or real estate websites or a marketing firm who are trying to either sell apartments in the building you will live in or maybe even sell the building itself. But you can often find floor plans for your own apartment or at the very least floor plans in the entire building. You can get building schematics on construction websites. You can do a lot of information that on the face of it seems pretty unthreatening.
You know, there's nothing particularly suspicious about floor plans. But if you put it in the right context or the wrong context, you realize that you're basically giving burglars or prospective burglars all the information they need to decide whether or not they're going to hit your apartment or even how they would do so, like where your master bedroom might be located in terms of the staircase or elevator shaft. And I think it's really interesting to think that there are people out there who are studying architecture and they are using floor plans and they are familiar with all of the things that architecture students and architects would be familiar with. But they're using it in a very different tactical way.
And you know, that's a pretty unsettling thing I think to realize. I think in the book, it does make very clear that despite how easy it might be to romanticize and kind of enjoy the problem solving genius of a lot of these cases that you discuss of people being able to break into spaces and get away with what they want. Despite that, it's really does the book does not make too much does not try to romanticize and in fact kind of goes back into the fact that of course these are criminals and that the way that the crimes actually are committed are in some ways, not just a transgression of actual personal property, but also, you know, had this uncalculable or unquantifiable personal effects on the actual victims of the course, like the idea of privacy trust pass. It's difficult to put monetary value on that one sort of sense of trust and security in your own private space is compromised.
But I also love despite the fact that it's not overly romanticizing the crime, at the beginning you kind of make this offhand description of the burglar who looks around the city and can't stop seeing open sites and vulnerable points everywhere as a kind of part of the spectrum of neurodiversity that they simply can't help but have this impulse to break in to kind of trespass on those boundaries and other senses of privacy. I was wondering, maybe you could try to like form some type of comparison between that level of impulse and that kind of spark of excitement and creativity around solving these problems and the actual personality of an architect and what we kind of value in the architects persona. Yeah, I think that, you know, fundamentally, and that's one of the things that's so interesting about Burgery is that this is an architectural crime. It's about looking at buildings and specifically buildings and trying to find ways to as it were solve them.
And so I think what's interesting there is that Burgery then, if you look at it from a kind of cognitive point of view is almost this notion that you're willing to treat the built environment as the three dimensional puzzle and you're trying to find a shortcut, a solution, you're trying to sort of game the system as it were, and you're trying to find a new way to get from one room to the other. Or to otherwise misuse a structure in a way that the original architect might not have anticipated. And so what I think is interesting there is that, you know, as you mentioned, that would also be a really kind of fundamental approach for an architect, him or herself. So, you know, when you see a building and you're trying to figure out why the stairs are where they are, and you realize that the architect could have easily solved the interior in a different way.
You know, the stairs could have been placed in a totally different area. The circulation could have been switched around. You could have done different things with the rooms. You could have rearranged the sequence of rooms in the first place.
You know, that's kind of like thinking like a burglar in that you are looking at how else the interior can be used or how else you could redesign it sort of for your own needs. And so you see that level of thinking with Burgers, too, where you realize that, you know, if they can't get through a doorway to get through into another room because it's a lock, they can't get passed or it's too heavily guarded to even consider, you know, they realize that they can just go around all together and cut through the wall and just introduce a new doorway. You know, they can make a hallway where there wasn't a hallway before or, you know, change the circulation of the building from within. And I think that is a compulsive approach to the built environments that comes from, yeah, really kind of looking at it as a game or a puzzle or something that is meant to be solved, not just to be taken at face value.
And there's something really interesting about that. And I imply this or say in the book that, you know, the interesting implication is that in fact, it's people who aren't burglars who are sort of misusing the built environment in that they are being way too passive and they're just taking buildings at face value. They're just assuming that they're meant to go down that hallway or follow those doors or stand in line for that elevator when in fact there's a much more creative and hands on approach to the built environment that they're missing out on. And you know, Burgers, to one extent, reveal it.
But then of course, as you mentioned, the kind of creative studying of structure that architects engage in is another way to undercut what we are expected to do inside the built environment. So fascinating book and I recommend anyone who's interested in true crime or architecture to read it. Thank you so much, Deb, for joining us. Thanks for listening to Archimex Sessions One to One with Jeff Mannau, Danilovoynoth edits the podcast, and Matt Scalinges composed our music.
Myself and Pappatruna are the producers of One to One. New episodes come out every Monday. You can subscribe to us on iTunes and Google Play Music, and if you like the podcast, please consider leaving us a review. We are at Archimex sessions on Twitter and you can email us at connect.com.
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