If the door’s locked, try the wall
Feb. 17th, 2018 07:54 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dragonlady7via http://ift.tt/2o6FFf9
we-are-rogue:
[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; it’s 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 think—the way the architects had hoped he would behave—looking for doors and hallways when he could simply carve a new route where he wanted it. The ensuing realization delights him. “Elated at the idea that I could cut my own door right where I needed one,” 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 “own door” through to the manager’s office, where he takes whatever he wants—departing right back through the very “door” 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. “Surely if someone were to rob the place,” he writes in all italics, barbed with sarcasm, “they’d 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 that’s right next to a glass window.” 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 world’s most basic spatial assumptions, too scared to think past the tyranny of architecture’s long-held behavioral expectations.
To use architect Rem Koolhaas’s 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 burglar’s eyes, they aren’t even there. Cut a hole through one and you’re in the next room in seconds.
~ Geoff Manaugh, A Burglar’s Guide to the City
uh this is cute and all but it’s literally how our store was robbed this summer. this is how big robbery rings operate. we’re one of several similar stores targeted this way.
there are three stores in the building, it’s a little mini-mall kinda area. we’re on one end, with motion detectors and alarms and decent locks. (huge glass windows– but, motion detectors. very sensitive ones. if you try to open the door you might trigger the alarm. once our heat system’s draft moving a photo light umbrella set it off.)
the middle one sells hearing aids. expensive, but they all have tiny GPS trackers inside them. (this is real, by the way.)
the far store sells insurance. they have no security system, and rinky-dink locks on their doors, because why would they need robust security, no one is going to break into an insurance salesman’s office. anything sensitive is on the computers. there’s not even cash on site.
So the burglars broke in the insurance office. they’d scouted us out, knew where our motion detectors were, realized that the one in the back room was such that it would catch the back door, but not the farthest corner. the one in the front room was aimed at the entrance, and not pointed at the inventory shelves.
they sawzall’d through the insurance office bathroom, into the hearing aid place’s back room. they ignored the expensive hearing aids, apparently realizing that their GPS trackers would give them away, but they did steal a stereo system still in its box, that had just been purchased.
then they sawzall’d through the wall of the hearing aid place, into the… bathroom of the hearing aid place. whoops. then they re-oriented themselves, sawed through our wall, and pushed a shelving unit exactly as far as they’d previously observed that they could go without our back room’s motion detector picking them up. (sure enough, that model has a tiny light that illuminates when it sees you, and it does that all day whether the alarm’s armed or not. that’s a huge flaw! wow! i never would have noticed.)
Then at their apparent leisure they cleared out the inventory in our back room, then went into the front room, ducking low and hugging the walls, and took only cameras they knew they could sell. they left behind some cameras we had that were discontinued, and some lenses that were on the shelf closest to the sensor, on display and not in their boxes and so more difficult to transport; clearly, they knew what they wanted.
then they left. the alarm never went off. no one noticed anything until monday morning when the insurance people opened up and were like… where does this giant hole go???
(Your picture was not posted)
we-are-rogue:
[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; it’s 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 think—the way the architects had hoped he would behave—looking for doors and hallways when he could simply carve a new route where he wanted it. The ensuing realization delights him. “Elated at the idea that I could cut my own door right where I needed one,” 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 “own door” through to the manager’s office, where he takes whatever he wants—departing right back through the very “door” 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. “Surely if someone were to rob the place,” he writes in all italics, barbed with sarcasm, “they’d 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 that’s right next to a glass window.” 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 world’s most basic spatial assumptions, too scared to think past the tyranny of architecture’s long-held behavioral expectations.
To use architect Rem Koolhaas’s 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 burglar’s eyes, they aren’t even there. Cut a hole through one and you’re in the next room in seconds.
~ Geoff Manaugh, A Burglar’s Guide to the City
uh this is cute and all but it’s literally how our store was robbed this summer. this is how big robbery rings operate. we’re one of several similar stores targeted this way.
there are three stores in the building, it’s a little mini-mall kinda area. we’re on one end, with motion detectors and alarms and decent locks. (huge glass windows– but, motion detectors. very sensitive ones. if you try to open the door you might trigger the alarm. once our heat system’s draft moving a photo light umbrella set it off.)
the middle one sells hearing aids. expensive, but they all have tiny GPS trackers inside them. (this is real, by the way.)
the far store sells insurance. they have no security system, and rinky-dink locks on their doors, because why would they need robust security, no one is going to break into an insurance salesman’s office. anything sensitive is on the computers. there’s not even cash on site.
So the burglars broke in the insurance office. they’d scouted us out, knew where our motion detectors were, realized that the one in the back room was such that it would catch the back door, but not the farthest corner. the one in the front room was aimed at the entrance, and not pointed at the inventory shelves.
they sawzall’d through the insurance office bathroom, into the hearing aid place’s back room. they ignored the expensive hearing aids, apparently realizing that their GPS trackers would give them away, but they did steal a stereo system still in its box, that had just been purchased.
then they sawzall’d through the wall of the hearing aid place, into the… bathroom of the hearing aid place. whoops. then they re-oriented themselves, sawed through our wall, and pushed a shelving unit exactly as far as they’d previously observed that they could go without our back room’s motion detector picking them up. (sure enough, that model has a tiny light that illuminates when it sees you, and it does that all day whether the alarm’s armed or not. that’s a huge flaw! wow! i never would have noticed.)
Then at their apparent leisure they cleared out the inventory in our back room, then went into the front room, ducking low and hugging the walls, and took only cameras they knew they could sell. they left behind some cameras we had that were discontinued, and some lenses that were on the shelf closest to the sensor, on display and not in their boxes and so more difficult to transport; clearly, they knew what they wanted.
then they left. the alarm never went off. no one noticed anything until monday morning when the insurance people opened up and were like… where does this giant hole go???
(Your picture was not posted)
