A Burglar's Guide to the City (21 page)

Buildings call for certain behaviors—even if their spatial demands are often so subtle that, at first glance, we don’t realize we’ve been obeying them.

Tschumi’s larger point is that if the design of a space or a building tends to influence what occurs within it, then the role of the avant-garde designer is to push past this, to find new ways of challenging or disrupting architecture’s behavioral expectations. Why not graze cows inside a church—or at least design barns to look like churchyards?

Tschumi began to explore this notion through what he called screenplays: each “screenplay” was a black-and-white diagram breaking down a range of events that might occur inside an architectural space. Tschumi drew them in a way that resembled dance notation or the spatial analysis of a film scene. How do the people move, he wanted to know—how do they respond to one another or to the props scattered around them in space? Where do the actors stand during key moments of narrative drama? Tschumi believed that this was all part of the scenography of architectural design, and the ultimate visual results of his explorations ended up looking a lot like football-strategy diagrams—a comparison he himself has made—featuring abstract geometric shapes that tracked the movement of people past one another and through the rooms around them.

Fair enough. But what does this have to do with burglary? For Tschumi, what we think of as a “crime” typically occurs when a user of architecture does something radically out of sequence, breaking with the pattern that a building might imply—for example, sneaking past security at an airport to board a plane without following the traditional sequence of approach, entering the vault of a bank without first being granted the manager’s permission, or, to cite a recent real-life example, jumping the fence outside the White House to enter the president’s home by the back door. These are crimes of sequence. They are crimes of space.

Tschumi, writing in the late 1970s, at a time when American cities were falling apart, the Bronx was on fire, and New York City as a whole seemed on track to become the Mogadishu of its day—a city not to settle in but to escape—became obsessed with crime. Crime, for Tschumi, was just another way to use the city. Looked at in a specifically architectural context, crime reveals how people try to use or misuse the built environment. Criminals are more like rogue usability experts, analyzing architecture for shortcuts, hiding spots, and other spatial tricks. As Tschumi once wrote, “To really appreciate architecture, you may even need to commit a murder”—a statement he accompanied with a photo of someone being pushed out the window of a tall building. The building itself would be an accomplice to the crime.

In a way, Tschumi was simply pursuing the interests of an architect to their logical conclusion: he wanted to know how people use cities and inhabit space, whether it’s walking up New York’s Fifth Avenue or plotting a murder in Central Park. Indeed, such a murder is the scenario he turned to next with a project called
The Manhattan Transcripts
. Now something of a cult classic among architecture students,
The Manhattan Transcripts
diagrams a fictional murder in Central Park, implying that the crime could be used to reveal previously unknown or repressed forensic insights about how people really want to use the city, whether or not what they choose to do there is legal. For Tschumi, the murder mystery was as architectural a genre as any other.

For all Tschumi’s obsession with crime and space, however, he chose to write about murder rather than burglary—despite the fact that the latter is the ideal spatial crime, literally defined by its relationship to architectural space. A bank heist or an apartment burglary—not a fictional murder in Central Park—would have been a much better fit for Tschumi’s narrative goals. Imagine for a moment planning a heist on the thirty-fourth floor of a New York City high-rise, or plotting a burglary in a popular art museum. These require sequential thinking, elaborate timetables, and precise plans of action that purposefully and strategically differ from the events that are officially—that is, legally—allowed to occur there. Heists and burglaries are the ultimate Tschumian crimes.

Tschumi—Swiss-born and still working internationally—currently lives in New York City. On a blazingly hot summer day, he talked to me about these old explorations of his, looking at the strange inflection point where avant-garde spatial theory imperceptibly blurs into a criminal plan of attack. This is where a burglar’s guide to a building becomes an alternative form of architectural criticism, I suggested; burglars simply look for different shortcomings, vulnerabilities, and weak points in the design.

Tschumi didn’t disagree—but he wanted to back up a bit, concerned that the phrasing of my question risked making burglars into heroes or role models. “For a long time,” he said instead, “my chief interest had to do with cities in general, and the extent to which an entire city could be transformed by an act of creative misuse. I was fascinated by the role of insurgency, for example, from the nineteenth century, or in the 1960s with the student movements, or even in Northern Ireland, with what was happening in Londonderry and in Belfast. I was interested in how people with a particular intent could take over certain parts of the city with an action that could transform the way the city was used.” Motivated individuals or groups, he observed, could use “the complexity of the city against itself,” uncovering the possible behaviors that a building or space unintentionally allows, then adapting them to stage a protest, overthrow a government, demand political representation, or, yes, simply to commit a crime.

Tschumi became quite animated as we discussed this, taking me back to his original idea of the transcript or architectural notation. Traditional architectural representation, he emphasized—such as sections sliced vertically through a building to show what’s happening in every room, or floor plans used to explain how each room connects to all the others—lacks the ability to communicate events in time. It’s much more difficult to make an architectural drawing of a riot, a revolution, or a bank heist—but not impossible.

For Tschumi, this inability to represent events in space remains a fundamental weakness in architectural thinking today. The goal of his earlier work had specifically been to find a way for architects to reliably visualize the events that might take place inside their spaces; but it never became an accepted technique, just an art project, a series of avant-garde posters and drawings.

In these sorts of crimes, Tschumi pointed out, the architecture is
always
involved. In every heist film, he said, “The vaults and corridors and elevator shafts are just as important as the characters in the story; one cannot exist without the other. The space itself becomes a protagonist of the plot. There is no space without something that happens in it; and nothing happens without a space like this around it.” The same thing is often true for grand public plazas in the hearts of cities: these can be used as nothing but picturesque backdrops for tourists to take photos of each other or as insurrectionary platforms for starting a revolution. It’s all about how you use the city—or misuse it, turning the fabric of the city against itself.

In fact, one of the most spectacular art heists of the last decade is thought to have succeeded precisely because of a flaw in a museum’s architectural design, which inadvertently allowed the general public to study the internal patterns of the security guards and visitors. The Kunsthal in Rotterdam, designed by Rem Koolhaas’s firm OMA, was robbed in the middle of the night back in October 2012; seven paintings were stolen, including works by Matisse, Gauguin, Monet, and Picasso. Ton Cremers, founder of the Museum Security Network, an online forum, put some of the blame for this on the building itself: the museum’s expansive floor-to-ceiling windows offered a clear and unobstructed view of many of the paintings hanging inside. More important, they also allowed a constant, real-time surveillance of the internal workings of the museum for anyone passing by—the patterns of visitors and the comings and goings of the guards were effectively on public display. Thus thieves could have sat outside in a nearby park, watching until they found the right moment to strike. The museum had its own internal rhythm of events that the burglars interrupted with a perfectly timed counterevent: the heist. This is the rhythmic space-time of burglary.

I thought of Roofman. In his case, this sort of Tschumian analysis would translate into using a business’s internal timetable against itself: when managers and security guards walk their rounds, for example, or when employees change shifts. For that matter, I suggested aloud, just think of all the hundreds of film scenes in which bank robbers are shown clicking a stopwatch the instant they burst through a bank’s front doors, knowing that they only have a certain number of minutes—even mere seconds—to get the job done before a security response. They uncover and then misuse the existing schedule of the bank’s security to help them commit their crime.

*

For Roofman, it must have looked as if the rest of the world were locked in a trance, doing the exact same things at the exact same times of day—in the same kinds of buildings, no less—and not just in one state, but everywhere. It’s no real surprise, then, that he would become greedy, ambitious, overconfident, stepping up to larger and larger businesses—but still targeting franchises and big-box stores. They would all have their own spatial formulas and repeating events, he knew; they would all be run according to predictable loops inside identical layouts all over the country.

With overconfidence came carelessness, and Roofman was eventually arrested and imprisoned in North Carolina’s Brown Creek Correctional Institution. Now the police finally knew his name and backstory: Roofman was Jeffery Manchester, a former U.S. Army reservist with a peculiar eye for spatial patterns. But as quickly as they locked him up, he broke out, escaping from Brown Creek—the first person ever to do so—by hiding underneath a delivery truck. He was carried to safety by the easily memorized and predictable schedule of a package-delivery van.

Manchester made a beeline for nearby Mecklenburg County, North Carolina, where he’d been told by his fellow inmates that sentences for commercial burglary—should he ever want to commit one again—were not as severe as in surrounding areas. There, his architectural proclivities took an especially bizarre turn. His (second) arresting officer, Sergeant Katherine Scheimreif of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department, spoke to me about his January 2005 recapture.

When Scheimreif and the Charlotte Police found him again, Manchester had been living for several months inside an apartment of his own making, disguised behind a bicycle display in the walls of Toys “R” Us. This was only one of two such apartments: Manchester later abandoned his first hiding place to burrow through the outer wall of the toy store into an abandoned Circuit City next door. There, he constructed a surprisingly well-kept new home tucked beneath a stairwell, a twenty-four-hour burglary HQ hidden inside the walls of an American chain store, taking his brand loyalty to a strange new level of spatial intensity where ever-more-elaborate plots could be hatched.

Scheimreif referred to Manchester’s unlikely abode as “his little spider hole,” and my first reaction was to assume that this was a condescending analogy, a cop’s put-down, as if comparing Manchester to vermin or to a bug. To an extent, it was—but Scheimreif was being amusingly literal. Manchester had been sleeping on Spider-Man-themed bedsheets, with Spider-Man film posters tacked up on his makeshift walls, surrounded by DVDs stolen from the children’s toy store next door. This pirate of space-time, ritualistically breaking his way into identical commercial moments across the country, convinced of his own genius, had constructed for himself the escapist bedroom of an eleven-year-old.

But Manchester didn’t stop there. He also installed his own, parallel surveillance network inside the Toys “R” Us, using stolen baby monitors to spy on the movements of guards and employees, looking out for rhythms, patterns, and times of weakness as he planned his next blockbuster caper. “He would just watch the baby monitor and know exactly when everyone was coming and going,” Sergeant Scheimreif explained. It was a more sophisticated version of his old days as Roofman. “Everything in these businesses is so procedurally organized,” she pointed out. “They put the money away at the same time; they cook the fries at the same time. These corporations organize things like this for a reason, but they’re not thinking about these other kinds of people.”

Think back to Bernard Tschumi’s point that all buildings imply a certain kind of use or behavior; this is not just true for art museums and churches. A McDonald’s or a Toys “R” Us is designed to facilitate a specific retail sequence in which customers enter, choose their goods, stand in line, and pay. But Sergeant Scheimreif’s “other kinds of people” have discovered something like a parallel world hidden inside all of this: these sequences also and entirely accidentally contain a kind of countersequence, a crime nestled in the building’s lulls and blind spots. It’s the flip side of all those regularized floor plans, daily schedules, and employee rhythms. It’s the same dots connected to make a different picture.

With his own surveillance network in place, Manchester made perhaps his best discovery of all: he could actually rearrange and interfere with the building’s rhythms until they began to form the pattern he was waiting for. Indeed, Manchester “had become so attuned to his Toys ‘R’ Us,” Sergeant Scheimreif added, “that he actually began changing its security system and changing the schedules of the employees.” He was engineering a perfect moment so that he could strike.

In the commission of what would turn out to be his final major crime, however, an off-duty sheriff’s deputy unexpectedly arrived, throwing off Manchester’s meticulously arranged plans. His Mr. Nice Guy character finally broke, and Roofman resorted to violence, punching the female deputy, stealing her gun, and fleeing the premises. All of a sudden, a slew of random details began falling into place for the police. An earlier false alarm at the toy store had been blamed on a rodent, but suspicions had nonetheless been raised. The Charlotte-Mecklenburg police had already searched the abandoned Circuit City next door—even tugging on an odd piece of drywall that was an entrance to Manchester’s burrow. His bizarre hiding spot was now soon discovered.