Friday, March 3, 2023

Thinking outside architectural (and other) boxes

 

I found this on the Tumblr blog "Chemistry, Only Better".


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.


There's more at the link.

Apart from the obvious (i.e. architectural/construction) application, this can fit so many things in life.  If a door (to something we want/need/desire/whatever) is locked, try the wall, or the window, or the ceiling, or...  So often I've beat my head against a locked door, then turned aside to try something else.  If I'd persevered and tried to go around the door, things might have been different.  (On the other hand, of course, they might not.  Sometimes it makes more sense not to waste time and effort on the impassable door, and look for a different one, perhaps in a different building.)

Food for thought, in many ways.

Peter


9 comments:

  1. Reminds me strongly of computer/network security.

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  2. Decades ago my wife's office got robbed. Mostly computers, but other stuff as well. The thiefs ignored the locked glass doors and simply cut a new entry in the hallway.

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  3. This is why locking doors is no obstacle to someone determined to get in your home when you are gone. Locking doors only makes sense when you are home, to give you time to go into defense mode. Anyone with a utility knife can cut their way through the vinyl siding and insulation of your average tract home, given enough uninterrupted time.

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  4. When I was around 11(?) I remember reading in an Air Force Security manual this Pearl of Wisdom. "Locks only keep honest people out." I have no reason why, but that has stuck with me through out the decades.

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  5. Locks work to keep most criminals looking fir an easier target, police needing a warrent, and to keep honest people honest

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  6. His story perfectly explains why gun control can never work: the criminal has already decided to break the law! They're not going to follow a gun law while ignoring larceny...

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  7. I read a story several years ago about a robbery of a gem dealers home where the criminals hid in his attic until he opened his safe, then they busted through the ceiling and held him at gunpoint to empty the safe.
    Remember the safe deposit robbery a couple years ago in Britain? Thieves tunneled from the sewer to the basement vault, then drilled through the concrete over Easter weekend.
    Another example: there have been times when police locked a person in a room and he moved acoustic tiles and climbed over the wall into an adjoining unlocked room to escape!
    The moral is that determined criminals are inventive and simple solutions are usually ineffective against them.
    In my opinion, the best way for you to avoid this is for no one to know what you have. If you, can't avoid that, then masonry is your friend and think in all 3 dimensions.

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  8. Apartment complexes (depending on the state and age of construction) have the requirement for firewalls in the ceilings between units. Some try to skip that, which is both a fire and a security hazard.

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  9. I was at a security equipment trade show just a few years ago when an acquaintance received notice of a robbery of one of his high profile accounts. We were concerned for him and his reputation and as info came in it was revealed that the robbers had broken into a neighboring vacant office suite, then kicked a hole through the drywall into the secure office near the panel and attacked the panel and tore it from the wall, and proceeded to rob the place. I worked with a retired law enforcement man who in security layout counted on the laziness of robbers. They may come in through something other than the main door, but are unlikely to carry their loot out a broken window or second floor balcony. But no guarantees because clever ones had robbed some of his business customers by backing a truck through the wall, throwing a cable around what they were there for, and speeding off quicker than the LEO response time. On the opposite extreme I’ve seen folks back into a drop off area with signs posted that they are being recorded and give a great view of their personal license plate, or an addict hunker down and act like a bag on the pile every time a car drives by then stand up and stretch and give great face shots on six visible cameras watching the space.

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