A Burglar's Guide to the City (24 page)
He compares this to earlier urban conflicts in which architecture played a central role, including the urban barricades of the Paris Commune in 1871 and the house-to-house fighting during France’s colonial urban warfare in Algiers. In the latter case, combatants relied on “alternative routes, secret passageways and trapdoors,” Weizman writes. This technique, known as mouse-holing, seems as much an act of haunting as it is an act of war.
In the Israeli case, many of these tactics were developed specifically because doorways had been booby-trapped with pressure-sensitive, improvised explosive devices—analogous, in our case, to motion sensors or burglar alarms, or to Bill Mason’s eyeing that well-guarded hotel doorway and knowing he could never pass through it. Moreover, to avoid being seen from above by spotters hidden on rooftops or in the windows of nearby houses—comparable, in terms of burglary, to security cameras or police helicopters—the soldiers needed to achieve a new kind of invisibility, a kind of militarized stealth. This meant moving forward using “fractal maneuvers,” as a representative of the Israeli military describes them in an interview with Weizman, tunneling from one building to the next or disappearing into the architectural environment like an insect—or being absorbed into it, we might say, like water into a sponge.
The soldiers were able to navigate through this new maze of openings by leaving spray-painted traces on the walls behind them—arrows and other directional markers that served as military way-finding glyphs offering a clear path through the dust, wrecked furniture, screaming families, and twisted rebar.
As Weizman points out again and again, this approach may be tactically ingenious, but it is also fraught with moral peril and with highly dangerous ethical implications. Indeed, he refers to all this as “lethal theory.” By thinking of a target purely as an architectural obstacle—an empty building or depopulated neighborhood you simply have to blast through—the lives of the people residing there become entirely secondary. For Weizman, this turned the city into something more like “a military fantasy world of boundless fluidity, in which the city’s space becomes as navigable as an ocean.” This oceanic condition is something he compares to navigating a computer game.
These internal routes were carefully chosen based on detailed maps and aerial photographs. In burglary terms, we might say that the IDF had been casing the entire city of Nablus. Since that 2002 invasion, Weizman writes, the army has even developed detailed 3-D models of Gaza and the West Bank, down to the locations of internal doors and windows. Each structure has also been given an identifying number so that the otherwise impossibly complex task of signaling one’s location to other troops can be resolved simply by relaying a coded number, a kind of military lat/long for the ocean of architecture into which the soldiers have dived. Recall LAPD tactical flight officer Cole Burdette—or even retired NYPD detective Michael Codella—with his own numerical suggestions for navigating urban megastructures.
One immediately obvious possibility for resisting this—to avoid the tyranny of soldiers armed with 3-D maps or to deter outside invaders and architecturally informed burglars alike—would be to alter the internal layout of a structure so that it no longer corresponds to its official floor plans or existing 3-D models. An anecdotal example of this strategy comes from the work of my wife’s great-aunt, Joan Harding, an archaeologist and historian who founded an organization dedicated to documenting historic houses in the English county of Surrey. Harding’s job included drawing sets of interior plans for each home and estate—however, publicly accessible reproductions of those plans would deliberately omit certain key details for reasons of security. The drawings would leave out entire staircases, for example, or even every family bedroom, so that intruders could not use these documents to plot a burglary. The upshot of this is that many of England’s old country houses have, in effect, secret rooms and stairways—purely because those features do not appear on the buildings’ official floor plans.
While this is a different approach from the Israel Defense Forces example cited above—altering floor plans to hide the architecture rather than altering the architecture to diverge from the plans—the overall effect is the same: to disrupt someone’s knowledge of what to expect inside a structure.
For all this talk of art theft and military operations, one of Hollywood’s greatest heist films actually best depicts Weizman’s idea of “walking through walls,” taking it to delirious, action-blockbuster extremes.
Die Hard
is easily one of the best architectural films of the past three decades; it is, in many ways, a film about the misuse of architecture.
In the film—directed by John McTiernan and based on a novel called
Nothing Lasts Forever
by Roderick Thorp—a New York City cop named John McClane, while visiting his estranged wife in Los Angeles on his Christmas vacation, moves through a high-rise building, called Nakatomi Plaza, in what seems to be every conceivable way but by passing through its doors and hallways. He traverses the tower via elevator shafts and air ducts, crashes through windows from the outside in, and shoots open the locks of rooftop doorways. If there is not a corridor, he makes one; if there is not an opening, there soon will be. McClane blows up whole sections of the building; he stops elevators between floors; he rides on top of them instead of in them; and he otherwise moves through the internal spaces of Nakatomi Plaza in acts of virtuoso navigation that were neither imagined nor physically planned for by the architects.
This is one of the hallmarks of a good heist film: to borrow a term from Eyal Weizman, good heist films depict space as deeply infested with routes and openings, and with bandits hiding in the walls. People squeeze themselves between floors or into unlit gaps above ceilings; they find handholds inside elevator shafts or burst through walls to move from room to room. They swing from awnings and balconies; they drop down through ceiling tiles, disappear into vents, and radio back and forth to one another from cramped half spaces while the cops chasing them usually stick to the doors and hallways. It’s as if heist films always depict two competing methods for the use of architectural space, which then battle it out on-screen for tactical supremacy: the linear versus the nonlinear, the direct versus the indirect, the geometric versus the fractal.
In
Die Hard
, this indirect approach to the built environment pervades the film. Even the SWAT team who unsuccessfully assault the structure do so from its flanks, marching diagonally through a rose garden on the building’s perimeter. Meanwhile, the terrorists who seized control of Nakatomi Plaza in the first place do so after arriving by truck through the service entrance of an underground parking garage.
In one of the film’s most iconic scenes, McClane evades capture by climbing through an air duct—this after falling down an HVAC shaft when the machine gun he has been using as an anchorage point fails—giving the building’s ventilation system a second life as an escape route and adding to the popular mythology of the ventilation system as an overlooked, parallel system of circulation within a building. As we saw with Bill Mason, these vents are part of the architectural dark matter—the invisible backstage—that makes up so much of the built environment.
Indeed, McClane’s actions reveal a new type of architectural space altogether—a topological condition that we might call
Nakatomi space
, wherein buildings reveal near-infinite interiors, capable of being traversed through all manner of nonarchitectural means, with their own exhilarating form of boundless fluidity.
As a revelatory look at the labyrinthine, previously unexposed back corridors of the built environment—where the thirty-first floor is connected to the lobby or the twenty-sixth floor leads directly to the roof—the first
Die Hard
movie remains exemplary. Disguised as an action film, it is actually architectural moviemaking at its best and most spatially invested, turning walls, floors, and ceilings—rooms, corridors, and stairwells—into the unacknowledged costars of the picture, demonstrating that heist films are the most architectural genre of all.
A CRIME IS NOTHING IF YOU CAN’T GET AWAY
Kafka’s Paradox
In Franz Kafka’s parable “A Message from the Emperor,” you—the addressee of this shortest of short stories—are told that an imperial messenger is on his way to reach you.
It seems simple enough: the messenger only has to exit the emperor’s chambers, push his way through crowds of guards, find the right doors to the inner courtyard, walk across that, force his way through yet more crowds of attendants, work his way through a new series of doors and courtyards, down vast stairways and halls, hurrying through and around ever more and larger throngs of citizens and servants now spilling out into the town streets, shoving his way past secondary gates and garden palaces, through outer villages and packed squares, trying desperately to get to you—somehow—this now-labyrinthine task that seemed so easy growing more and more impossible by the instant.
It goes on like this forever, Kafka writes, a reverse Zeno’s paradox in which there is no real way to get anywhere, any promise of a clear path undone by yet more obstacles at every turn. The messenger is, for all intents and purposes, indefinitely detoured, stuck in traffic, unable to get away.
Outsmarting the City
It’s impossible to talk about getaways without talking about traffic: automobile traffic, pedestrian traffic, even boat traffic and congested skies. Traffic is always in the way, seemingly right when you’ve got the least time for it. However, rather than resign ourselves to the inevitability of obstacles, as Kafka implies, why not look at traffic as a burglar would? If a successful burglary is often one in which the interior of a building has illicitly been rearranged—with new doors sliced through drywall or vertical tunnels opened up, unexpectedly connecting floor to floor—or where the rhythms of a security patrol are used to time the precise moment of a heist, then the same technique can be applied on an urban scale.
Sometimes if you want to get away, you have to redesign the city around you, intervene in the fabric of the metropolis, and reengineer the city’s traffic patterns to open new paths of movement for your getaway.
“We could do anything with green lights all the way,” a character played by Mos Def remarks in the 2003 remake of
The Italian Job
. All the group would have to do is hack into L.A.’s electronic traffic-control network and make their chosen route through the city the only route there is: a long corridor of green lights leading them, and them alone, from one end of the city to the other. The ensuing computer-assisted getaway relies on a specific sequence of spatial events—such as cleared intersections and open back streets—that will help propel the crew to liberation. It’s a vehicular wormhole, a perforation cut straight through the moving mess of Los Angeles traffic, another kind of tunnel job with its own precision timing.
These
Italian Job
fantasies of urban-scale hacking—taking control of a city’s transportation network from within—are not just the stuff of Hollywood blockbusters. Consider the case of a fourteen-year-old boy who used what security expert Bruce Schneier described as a “modified TV remote control” to take over an entire tram system in Łodz, Poland. According to the city’s police, the boy turned his home remote control into an electromagnetic supertool that gave him command of every tram switch and junction in Łodz. The boy even “wrote in the pages of a school exercise book where the best junctions were to move trams around and what signals to change,” police explained. While he did not use this homemade magic wand for anything resembling a bank heist, it would have come in quite handy during a crime spree. As clearly as any example from Hollywood, this otherwise childish prank suggests that the most successful getaways of tomorrow will be achieved by hacking the city.
The technology is already here. At a 2014 security conference in Miami, Florida, self-described “professional hacker” Cesar Cerrudo revealed that he had discovered a security loophole in widely used urban traffic-management technology, allowing him to fool vehicle-detection systems into thinking the light needed to change. Through extensive field-testing, Cerrudo found that his technique worked best within 150 feet of an actual intersection, but that more powerful antennas could also be used. Someone could then spam an intersection with imaginary traffic data from a hiding place on a nearby roof—or, as Cerrudo himself demonstrated, “from a drone flying at over 650 feet” above the target. This security flaw designed into the city itself could clearly be used to engineer the perfect getaway. Indeed, burglary crews and organized-crime rings flying drones over a city to reprogram its intersections from above is something we are sure to see, not only in the real world but coming soon to a silver screen near you. The only question is which will come first. “I would be worried about attacks from the sky in the U.S.,” Cerrudo warned.
Spoofing a city’s traffic systems or a driver’s in-car GPS sensors is an equally effective way to engineer new routes across the city. This means not just overwhelming nearby GPS receivers with white noise, but, in effect, lying to them, convincing a dashboard navigation unit or smartphone mapping app to tell drivers that they are still heading in the right direction even as they veer wildly off course. In his book
Future Crimes
, author and former futurist-in-residence at the FBI Marc Goodman describes how GPS spoofing could be used to lead a delivery truck, street by street and block by block, to the wrong warehouse, where dozens if not hundreds of valuable boxes could be unloaded directly into the hands of criminals dressed like innocuous office workers. The driver is unlikely to realize the mistake—that the truck’s GPS unit had been taken over by criminals and that he or she just dropped everything off at the wrong address—until the delivery company is flooded with complaints about missing packages.