Vaissnavi Shukl
It is fascinating how every time in a movie we see a group of people hovering over a blueprint or more recently a holographic projection of a building. It’s either architects and real estate tycoons, or a group of highly skilled citizens planning a heist. While the intentions of the two groups are diametrically opposite in nature, with the former designing for safety and security, and the latter breaching it through the very design aimed to protect. The single common thread between the two is how they foreground architecture in their operations. I’m thinking about the Netflix show ‘Money Heist’, and the ‘Ocean’ series and even Bollywood movies like ‘Dhoom’ and ‘Special 26’, where stormwater drains, walls, staircases, parking lots, terraces, and retaining walls, become conduits for escorting huge amounts of cash and gold bars out of the buildings. So, our guest today is Geoff Manaugh, a Los Angeles based writer and the author of The New York Times bestselling book, ‘A Burglar’s Guide to the City’, where he examines architecture and urban planning through the lens of a burglar and some pretty wild real life cases.

I am Vaissnavi Shukl and this is Architecture Off-Centre, a podcast where we highlight unconventional design perspectives, practices, and research projects that reflect emerging discourses within the design discipline and beyond. Architecture Off-Centre features conversations with radical designers, thinkers, and changemakers who are redefining the way we live and interact with the built environment.

I’m super, super curious, what drew your attention to this very interesting but less talked about discourse of architecture. So what inspired you to look at buildings, infrastructure and cities through the eyes of a burglar?

Geoff Manaugh
Yeah, I mean, it’s a… it’s a funny question. It may not be the most expected route of research for someone writing about architecture. But I guess I’d say there were a couple things that really kind of led to me wanting to write the book and kind of perform this research. Um, one was is very simple. I’m a huge fan of films in general, but specifically of heist movies, and it just      began to seem sort of unbearably obvious, actually, while watching different movies where people break into a bank or they break into a mansion or they rob a casino, that that genre of film is kind of unique in its ability to foreground architecture. You know, it’s funny when you’re watching movies like that, that almost inevitably there’s a scene where people are actually discussing how a building is designed and so they crowd around the table and they look at floor plans, or they call up a 3d model on their computer screen and you know, talking about how to get from one room to the next or how to get from one building to the building across the street, suddenly, is not just for architecture nerds, it actually has great importance for the narrative characters, you know, for everything that’s happening in the drama. And so I started getting really interested in this idea that you know, if you wanted to watch a truly architectural film, you know, in a sense, you should be watching heist movies, and then I started looking into, you know, actual real world reports of bank robberies or pawn shops or jewellery stores being robbed. And it just became increasingly clear that, you know, one of the things that came out and those types of news articles or news reports, again, was this focus on architecture. You know, people were amazed that a burglary crew had cut a hole in the ceiling and dropped down into a building or they had used the sewer system to rob a building from below or they’d cut through a series of walls going through different stores or different homes even in order to get to their eventual target. And so what I wanted to do was really kind of take all of that take those architectural details and really focus on them and then and look at architecture from the perspective of a burglar, you know, what would a burglar see when he or she sees a building or you know, comes upon a different a new complex or a new facility? You know, how would they try to get in that isn’t the way the architect planned for them. So not just using the front door but finding their own way and, and, you know, I think we may even talk about this later. But then also, there’s a really interesting legal connection between burglary and architecture. You know, that kind of a burglary requires architecture, which is something that maybe we can come back to, but so I’d say that all of those things together really added up to me realising that this would be a really fun research project and something that would make a great book.

Vaissnavi Shukl
I’m sure that was I think. When you’re talking about a heist, I think we’re in the day and age when the most recent episode of Money Heist has just come out, and the Money Heist series on Netflix extensively talks about… about the plans and the blueprints for the building and I think the entire series kind of circles around the architecture of the building. So I can definitely relate to your work in that way. But as an architect, I would not necessarily have thought of following that as a scholarly person and I’ve read the book and it’s absolutely fascinating. So we’ll go back to your… you touched upon it briefly since our initial conversation, you briefly spoke about the technical and legal difference between a theft and a burglary, when the burglary is defined as illegal entry into a building with the intent of committing a crime and that crime could be fair, but the two words are not interchangeable. So one could be a subset of the other but not the other way around. Well, I guess a differentiating factor therefore, is the qualification of a building as a site of crime. When we as architects design buildings, we of course, think about safety, you know, the grilles and the doors and the parapet and the high walls that we do around the buildings, we think about safety and make provisions for protection against break ins. But I guess we never really assume the role of a burglar and think about how architecture might facilitate a certain kind of crime. I guess when you’re all preparing for design schools in India, there’s usually an exercise they make us, you know, like “draw a building as you would if you were an ant, draw a bird’s eye perspective”, but they would never say, “Draw a burglar’s’ eye perceptive”. If that’s anything. So what… What role does architecture play in the creation of a burglar’s playground? Can you talk about some of the fascinating cases you write about in the book?

Geoff Manaugh
Yeah, I mean, it’s a big question, but I think I’ll start off with that initial idea of, you know, the difference between theft and burglary. You know, it’s actually funny when I was writing the book, and even when it first came out, there were people that you know, were somewhat dismissive of the entire topic, because the question was, you know, why are you so interested in taking other people’s things, you know, what is it about theft that would interest you to write a whole book about it? But the funny thing is that I didn’t write a book about theft, and they’re actually totally different crimes. And so you can be a thief, for example, for your entire professional or criminal career, and never be a burglar and you can also be a burglar for 20 years and never steal anything. It’s actually just simply a legal category of crime or the intent to commit a crime that happens to take place inside a building that you don’t have permission to be in. And so you know, there’s a lot of different things that are, you know, unique to systems of law around the world and so some of the examples I’ll be giving are maybe particular to the United States, and maybe aren’t necessarily, you know, accurate for say, India or the United Kingdom or that kind of thing. But nevertheless, you know, you get into this scenario here where entering a building without permission, or even staying in a building without permission. So for example, if a store closes, but you’ve been hiding in it, and you’re still in it, you know, two or three hours after it closes, that’s still considered a form of illegal entry. There’s actually a great legal term for it. It’s called “surreptitious remaining”, which I think is a great and strange way to look at how…

Vaissnavi Shukl
Is it any different or similar to trespassing or no they are two separate entities?

Geoff Manaugh
It is similar, but they are different. So trespassing doesn’t necessarily entail the implication that you’re there to commit a crime, it just means that you’re there without permission. And so if you add that extra layer where maybe you are and it can be like almost comically specific tax evasion, for example, would would qualify as something that could make you a burglar so if I sneak into a building and I do something to evade taxes while I’m there, like I fill out a fake tax form that would legally speaking be burglary. But no, you know, for example, if I’ve got an unlicensed handgun or if I’m carrying illegal drugs, or whatever it might be and I’m inside a building without permission. Those two factors mean that a police officer would be able to say that I have committed a burglary. And so it’s a useful crime from a police person’s point of view. Because what they can do if they can’t necessarily get you for other crimes, they can say, well, you know, you had the intent of committing this crime inside a building. And it’s a very easy way just to sort of hold on to someone and so what that means, though, and it’s quite interesting is that it becomes actually very legally consequential to demonstrate that someone was inside or outside. And so a police officer, for example, would really want to prove that you were inside an architectural structure because it makes their job easier. And you get into an interesting thing where you know whether or not someone was beneath an awning instead of actually in a room or were they in a screened in porch instead of in the building. You know, there’s an example that I still love actually, that was because it just shows how absurd some of these scenarios can be. You know, so I mentioned that you don’t have to steal things to be a burglar. There was a… if you threatened someone, that’s also a crime that would make you susceptible to a burglary charge. And so there was a case I can’t remember the state it was in. It was here in the United States, where an individual went up to a homeowner and was leaning against the outside of her house and threatening her, but the tips of his fingers had crossed over from the windowsill into the interior of her house and so he was considered to have performed an entry into the into the architectural structure and while threatening her meant that he could be charged with burglary. So you know, it’s a funny thing where you know, all of these kind of abstract grad school arguments that you might get into an architecture school where, you know, you’re talking about the inside versus the outside, you know, what is an interior? Suddenly, those conversations go from being sort of slightly pretentious, philosophical arguments to being actually very, very consequential for you know, what may or may not be happening to someone in terms of… in terms of, you know, being charged with a crime. But in any case, I feel like you know, there there there are so many examples of how I think burglars really kind of tuned into architecture and use it as a way to figure out what they might, you know, hit or target next, you know, one of the people in the book cause you had mentioned some, you know, asked me about some of the fascinating cases, you know, there’s there’s a bunch where architecture is front and centre. One comes to mind at least, and that’s this guy named Bill Mason, who ended up writing a memoir actually about being, you know, an incredibly prolific jewel thief, he would break into people’s apartments and take jewellery, diamonds and that kind of thing. But his actual method of targeting was… was pretty fascinating. What he would do, he lived in Florida and so he would target high rise apartment buildings like the kind you see all over the Florida coast, kind of like the building that collapsed a couple months ago. Just go sit on the beach, you know, he’d maybe get a towel or he’d get a lounge chair would sit out there as if he was sunbathing but he would actually be studying the buildings behind the you know, behind him and watching for patterns. So he would try to see, you know, what are the balconies like, can I get from this balcony to that one? Is there a fire escape stair on the outside that I could use? Is there somebody who maybe has a ladder because they were hanging Christmas lights or they were hanging up potted plants and they’ve left their ladder out? Could he get to that ladder and then use it to get up to the next floor? You know, and then he would plot out his methods of entry based on whether or not someone had turned their lights off and seem to be going out to a restaurant and you know, he really kind of pieced together these things, you know, one by one and then eventually find a way almost like playing a video game to get from the ground floor. A staircase maybe from one balcony to the next from one floor to the next and then maybe to another balcony and then finally he would get to the apartment that he was trying to break into. And so I think that that method of kind of reading architecture from the outside in is not only pretty interesting from this point of view, but you know, even plays into something that that he wrote in his memoir, which was that, you know, he had grown up, really kind of not really with his parents but with building superintendents. So you know, he had learned how to, you know, not not feel as if he didn’t belong behind certain doors. So they might say do not enter or might say do not open but you know, he became comfortable with like the deep interiors of buildings, I guess you could say. He would open up the doors and he would go into the maintenance halls and he would, you know, basically kind of explore the places or the backgrounds of a building that people like you and I, maybe we… maybe we’re not comfortable going into those places. But you know, I feel like that kind of comfort with strange architectural spaces really kind of contributed to his criminal career later.

I’m just one other example. I mean, there’s… there’s a ton, the book is really kind of full of these. But there was a really interesting guy who actually had a nickname before they arrested him and figured out who he was, but he was known as “Roof Man”, and his criminal career is pretty incredible. I mean, it sounds like a comic book or like something a novelist would invent. But he was a guy who would… would target big box stores or fast food franchises. He did that on purpose because all the buildings would be very, very similar. So you know, he was a huge… he was constantly breaking into McDonald’s. And so McDonald’s tends to have a pretty similar floor plan. The kitchen is in the same kind of place. The manager’s office is in the same kind of place. And in addition to that, they also have very similar schedules. So you know, it’s a franchise at certain times a day you’re going to count the money you’re going to put the money into a safe you know, you’re going to go through certain procedures because it’s a very very regularised you know, economic undertaking, but he used both of those the timing of the McDonald’s. You know, safe opening or safe closing or your teams in the space of the McDonald building, to basically perform the same burglary over and over and over again, and he robbed dozens and dozens of these places, you know, throughout all over the United States from California to North Carolina. You know, he would often jump drop down through the roof, which is how he got his nickname you know, and then rob things and move on. But then eventually he got, you know, pretty, I guess you could say ambitious or maybe arrogant and decided that if he was so good at robbing McDonald’s, maybe he could also rob big box stores like Targets or Toys R Us, that kind of thing. So incredibly, actually later on in his criminal career, he actually broke into a Toys R Us and then tunnelled through the wall into a kind of an abandoned store next door, built himself an apartment hidden inside the walls behind the bike rack of a Toys R Us and he used stolen goods from the Toys R Us like baby cameras, you know, that you would use to watch your baby in the crib, and he set those up as a kind of surveillance network. And he would you know started memorising the schedules for the employees, sometimes even changing their schedule so that they wouldn’t be in on certain days. And then he just sort of lived off of the Toys R Us you know, going in and out. You know, they thought at one point maybe they had a they had a rat problem because they could hear some sounds, you know, and goods were being moved around in the middle of the night that they finally it’s a long story, but they finally figured out what it was and then they you know, they found this guy’s hidden apartment inside the wall of a Toys R Us. But in any case, I feel like that’s another example just of how someone uses kind of the space and time of architecture to plan and implement a criminal plot and again, you know, the book is full of examples like that, but those are two maybe maybe examples that make it clear about how these kinds of people might operate.

Vaissnavi Shukl
I don’t know If this is surprising, talking fascinating or a combination of all three, but there’s a part of me that really wants to you know, clap and commend the creativity of these individuals in terms of looking at buildings through a different perspective and using them as a conduit for their own criminal stuff. But I often wonder is, while you were doing research for your book, if there was ever a moment where there was just this moment of ingenuity where it’s like,”Damn, you got to give it to these guys”, for just their creativity or the street smartness or whatever word we want to use for it, but with regards to the appropriation of building elements, and you know, all these services as ways to reverse engineer the entire thing. I mean, I’m almost wondering how the templatization of capitalistic enterprises has, you know, was used against them says as the design for all of them are the same and you’re like, Okay, well, if I’ve cracked one McDonald’s, I can probably crack all of them there has to be like some factor of innovativeness in there. So I’m almost curious if you ever thought about that as well. You know, if there’s a toolkit for how you could reverse engineer buildings, and if you were to crack through them, if there’s a way to do it, or if there is a common toolkit that people followed that enabled them to do what they wanted to do. You got to give it to them, though.

Geoff Manaugh
Yeah, no, I mean, it’s true. I mean, I’m in the funny thing, I think is that kind of moral peril where you start studying this stuff, and you begin to become sort of tempted to think that, you know, the creativity is something that almost deserves to be rewarded, you know, which is a, you know, an ethical challenge, I think when navigating this kind of research, you know. But I think that one of the things that I talked about in the book as well, I mean, there’s many, many ways around that kind of moral dilemma, but one of them is that you know, you really are, you can recognise the creativity of someone’s approach without advocating what they’re doing. I think that also it’s important to point out that you know, when you start looking into how a burglar might get into a building, especially if it’s going through a wall from one room to the next or you know, using specialty tools to get through a door or through the outside of a building’s envelope into the interior, you know, other people not only do that but need to do that and it’s for totally different reasons. So, I mean, for example, there are and I talked about this in the book, you know, SWAT team police responses to buildings, you know, also uses advanced… They use advanced tools to get into facilities. Often, those tools, you know, scaled up or made even more aggressive, you know, are just military tools that are also used to get into, you know, say the compound where Osama bin Laden was hiding or that kind of thing.

Vaissnavi Shukl
I was just thinking about that as like, if anybody has seen ‘Zero Dark Thirty’ And the way he was captured in about about, it’s literally all about the play of the house, drone surveillance and, you know, they mapped out the entire building, they were mapping his movements in the courtyard, you know, “When would he be out?” It’s almost like the guy staying on the beach and looking at people’s movements in the buildings. You know, “When does he take a walk? When does he go back in?”, you know, how is the whole structure but that…

Geoff Manaugh
Yeah, and it’s and it’s funny, because if you look at some of the tools that are used, even by those, those military teams, you know, and if talking about military teams, I think I’m sure for some of your listeners will sound just as ethically dubious as talking about burglars, but a lot of these tools are actually you know, some of the places they originate from actually fire departments. So the reason why I say that is because, you know, if you have to get into a burning structure and find your way through a wall because there’s a corridor that’s on fire, or it’s so filled with smoke, you can’t see you know, where someone is trapped, you know, on the wrong side of a firewall, and if you have to rescue them, or if you have to simply put the fire out. You know Fire Departments aren’t just, you know, people with water hoses, you know, often it’s… it’s axes and saws, and it’s tools that are used to respond to… to car accidents, and to get people out of crashed vehicles. You know, when you look at the kinds of things they do, you know, it’s very, very similar actually to thinking how a burglar thinks, you know, you look at the floor plan and you realise that there’s a, there’s a different way to get from point A to point B. And it’s not, it’s not what the architect intended, you know, it’s to go down through this floor and then through that wall, and then maybe out through the exterior or maybe out through a window. You know, it’s this totally different. Sort of lateral way of looking at architecture. So in and of itself, that is not an immoral way to approach the built environment. You know, it’s actually just treating buildings kind of like puzzles, you know, how can I crack this building or solve the puzzle of this building? And then it’s up to you, I guess, basically, you know, in terms of your your moral inclination, you know, are you going to use that to become a firefighter, you’re going to use that to become a first responder, you’re going to use that to become a burglar. But I think that that’s one of the ways kind of out of the moral dilemma of talking about burglary from an architectural point of view. You know, it’s certainly not and I’m certainly not advocating that anybody you know, listening to this podcast or who reads my book, know that you inflict misery on other people by breaking into their homes or stealing things that are of value to them personally, which, you know, is obviously not something I advocate. But in terms of thinking about the built environment from a kind of diagonal point of view, I think it’s actually really useful and really creative, especially because it opens up maybe creative opportunities for an architect to think differently about how to get, you know, actual sort of legitimate users of a building from one floor to the next. Or, you know, rethinking, you know, maybe a side or back entry point or even, you know, totally different material palettes in terms of sliding walls or internal windows or you know, sort of creative approaches that would be of interest and might come from thinking like a burglar

Vaissnavi Shukl
While we refill our coffee, here’s an excerpt from our next episode with publisher and educator, Natascha Meuser, who used crime as a tool for developing fictional narratives in a studio focusing on Walter Gropius’, Torton Housing Estate.

Natascha Meuser
 “The house is very small and the stairs are very small. And I said if you now try to explain if you murder somebody and you have to carry in the body downstairs, then you have to pay attention. What kind of stairs are there? Is it wood? Is it stone? Is it loud? If you is it making noise when you carry a body? Is the handrail good enough? And then what happened is suddenly the students started paying more attention about the details.”

Vaissnavi Shukl
I’m actually thinking about it. And I was going to I was leading to another question, but how do you imagine that the book comes into play in say, professional practice now that as a discourse that you’ve created, you’ve made the book about of designing for security or designing for protection was at a concentration while writing the book in terms of how it might be used in offices or practices. Not…not just by looking at buildings through the eyes of a burglar but also in terms of designing buildings in a certain way, just so that the cases that you’ve talked about, or the instances that you’ve measured are not repeated in buildings one is designing.

Geoff Manaugh
Yeah, that’s a great question. I mean, I definitely this kind of book, and, you know, maybe this book specifically, would help in terms of just sort of, you know, creative or abstract exercises for thinking about buildings differently, kind of as you as you indicated, I mean, on that level, I definitely see use for it. I do think actually, you know, we sort of talked about this, but the interest of architects in designing for security, I think it’s something that would be better to foreground during the design process. What I mean by that is that, you know, I think at least especially in the United States, you know, the idea of designing buildings that are, you know, genuinely secure or you know, genuinely kind of repel burglars I think has a kind of, it almost has a kind of political inclination or implication that you’re turning the city into a fortress or you’re turning your back on the public sphere or you’re trying to fortify the private home in a way that might be, you know, adversarial to having a real community in a neighbourhood because everybody lives in these fortresses or, you know, they live behind huge walls. I think that that’s a misunderstanding actually or a misinterpretation of architectural security. And I think a lot of architects because they are afraid of that, you know, just creating a city of fortresses sort of overlook that aspect of the process. And that leads to one of the problems I think, with architectural security today is that you know, homeowners business owners, you know, government agencies effectively needs to turn to an after market solution for this kind of thing. Which is why I think when you go, you know, walk around the neighbourhood, and look at single family homes and they’re surrounded by chain link fences or their walls or sorry, their windows have been just covered with bars so that you know, you can’t get in in the middle of the night. These are really ugly, inefficient, and, you know, unfortunate ways to address the problem of security. I think if architects kind of leave it up to the aftermarket world where you just have to go to the nearby a security firm or instal a burglar alarm or get bars instal installed on your window. No, that’s actually I think one of the problems I think, if architects were to say, hey, we don’t genuinely take seriously the creative challenge of security or the possibility that a burglar might target this building, and then trying to figure out a way to do that. I think he would have a really elegant way to fix those kinds of things, because that’s exactly what architects do. You know, they think creatively and elegantly about complex spatial problems. So I think like if that kind of thing was taken seriously in design school or at, you know, different design firms, I think we would actually find a really kind of, yeah, an exciting way to make cities and homes and businesses more secure and it wouldn’t even look, it would actually potentially look better. Certainly wouldn’t look like a world of fortresses. Or a world of iron bars or windows.

Vaissnavi Shukl
Yeah, I was thinking about, you know, suburbia in the US and suddenly everybody starts having a moat around their house. I mean, that’d be kind of kind of ridiculous. It’s like, well, we don’t want anybody coming into our house. So we’re going to have a more than we are going to lower down prejudice every time we want to invite somebody. But I’m almost thinking about the role of technology in this right because I feel like that aspect of security has developed so much and so quickly that you now have other tools that are not as architecturally dominant. They kind of fade into the background but also help with security. It just on that note, I was also thinking about another scale of territory, that kind of figures in the book and that you look at is that of not just the building but the city and I mean, this is such a broad area, all crimes happen in a city so it could be in a building outside of building but we’ve all seen movies where the underground sewage network is activated after a bank robbery, where the robbers use it as a means to escape the sea which serves not only its intended purpose of hosting plumbing lines and transporting waste but also becomes an exit route after a criminal activity. I’m wondering how urban infrastructure beats sewage or underground metros or debates, walkways, escalators, public infrastructure facilitates crime.

Geoff Manaugh
Yeah, it’s a great question. And it’s, I mean, it’s a it’s a fascinating thing to really kind of look into, I think, as you mentioned in the question, I mean, underground sewer systems and stormwater networks are, you know, kind of famous for their for their role in Hollywood, but also do play a role in real life crimes, you know, I have an entire chapter in the book that talks about a really famous case here or notorious case. I should say, here in Los Angeles, where a group of people who have still never been identified, you know, it’s an unsolved crime. It’s actually it’s beyond what’s known as the statute of limitations and so whoever did this crime could actually come forward now and they would not be able to be arrested foraged. Yeah. So you know, kind of kind of incredible. You know, back in the 80s. People who very obviously knew the city stormwater network, extraordinarily well, actually used it to break into a bank. So they used it both to get to the bank and to get away from the bank. And, you know, they were so good at what they did that at one point, the FBI thought they might have been disgruntled employees of the city water board. So you know, they were you know, they they knew how to get from one place to another they knew exactly where the tunnels went. You know, they knew even the exact dimensions of the tunnels because they had four wheel vehicles that they use to drive around underground while it while they were doing their tunnel. So you really can’t use or sort of bend infrastructure, you know, toward the direction of a crime. And you know, I talk about in the book, how even the the geology of a city can impact what kinds of crimes occur there. We have a place like Los Angeles, it’s quite easy to tunnel here. You know, it’s almost impossible though to tunnel in a place like Manhattan if you’re dealing with like, really heavy bedrock. You’d have to be Elon Musk or, you know, a disgruntled billionaire to have a tunnelling machine that could get you into a bank. I have a feeling they would hear you coming, you know, cities with, you know, certain kinds of ground conditions, you know, are more amenable to bank crimes, which is why you see a lot of bank crimes in places like London with all of its clay or even Berlin, which is built on very sandy soil. So, and also places in Brazil to are very easy to tunnel into. And so there’s a lot of tunnel crime in Brazil. But You know, I was interested to hear about things like, you know, another example I give often is a something that I learned about from the FBI that police departments also use this phrase, but as the idea of what it’s what’s called a stop and Rob. So that’s an example of where urban transportation infrastructure overlaps with financial institutions in a way that makes those financial institutions vulnerable to crime. And so a stop and rob the business, like a bank, or maybe a credit union, or a check cashing facility, at the bottom of an off ramp from the freeway and at the bottom of an on ramp for a freeway. And so that doesn’t happen all that often where those two things overlap. Yet when you find it, you’ve kind of found a perfect vulnerability hidden in the urban design of the city around you because it means you can pull off a freeway and rob a bank. You can run outside and get back in your car and be back on the freeway you know, all within five minutes and you know, before the police have even gotten a helicopter into the air, you know, you’re, you know, half a county away or you’re in a totally different part of the city and you’re using the city’s urban freeway system, you know, as a kind of accomplice in that act. And there’s just something really fascinating about that for me. Well, you know, when urban planners in the 1960s were kind of building and planning all of these freeways for cities like Los Angeles, or did they know or suspect that they were also laying the ground for a future crime spree? Because at one point in the early 1990s, in the late 1980s, la was the bank robbery capital of the world…At one at a time, there was a bank robbery in the city every 45 minutes of every workday, which is an awful lot of bank robbery. You know, there were many reasons for that, but one of them is the city’s freeway system. You know, it just made those banks very vulnerable. You know, and there’s a couple other examples you know, I don’t want to go on too long.

Vaissnavi Shukl
Do you think there was ever a urban planning policy written that would have try to correct this bank freeway relationship vulnerability at at some place or no? It’s still not a part of the policy has to bank an on be located within XYZ miles of on way or off way or something of that sort?

Geoff Manaugh
Yeah, that’s, that’s a great question. Actually. I am not aware of any restrictions like that. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t any, but I am not aware that there’s a restriction like that. Um, in fact, that’s another example I think of where you know security questions kind of like were what we were talking about a few minutes ago. I’m really kind of just get offloaded onto the property owner and so if you don’t want your bank to get robbed, you know, rather than turn to the city to you know, do anything with its its freeways or whatnot. You just have to invest in you know, plexiglass bulletproof barriers, or more cameras or die packs and the cash or, you know, better sightlines so that if somebody does flee the bank into your parking lot to get away, you know, you can actually get the licence plate number of the car or that kind of thing. So, you know, it’s a tricky and strange choreography between banking institutions, you know, federal investigators who are tasked with looking after bank crime. And then also, you know, the the criminals themselves. I mean, it’s interesting to point out, for example, that at one point in the in the 80s, in particular here in Los Angeles, a lot of banks just simply didn’t have a security guard because it was actually if you if you added up the amount of money that was stolen every year through bank heist, would be less than than the salary of a permanent security guard. And so they just said to themselves, why, you know, it’s just incredible, you know, the money in a sense wasn’t worth protecting. And so what happened you know, and I think it’s a it’s such an American thing is that there were so many lawsuits and so tellers who worked at a bank would sue the bank, you know, for not protecting them. Even sometimes customers would sue because they were involved in a bank heist, and they were terrified. The lawsuits are actually what made these banks realise that they had to start investing in security. So that actually led to this kind of explosion in what’s called Digital bandit barriers. Now, those are the Plexiglas walls that are between you and a bank teller, you know, that are bulletproof and that don’t allow you to get get over the counter that and security systems like cameras and then obviously permanent guards, but it’s just really funny that that’s actually what what led to kind of the explosion of the securitization of banks here.

Vaissnavi Shukl
Again, it’s like simple financial things, right. Just like the return on investment wasn’t wasn’t worth the investment. It says we’re like, okay, we won’t get a security guard. We’ll just deal with it when we have a heist.

Geoff Manaugh
Yeah, yeah, no, I think so. 

Vaissnavi Shukl
So it’s been. It’s been a while since you wrote this book, and I’m sure you wrote this book, especially dozens of new cases might have popped up and maybe now, every time somebody would read about a certain case where they could connect architecture to a burglary, they would probably have reached out to you and be like, hey, you know, this is what happened and this is what made us think of your book. Any plans for doing like a second, third edition or a part two to the book where you would record all the advancements and all the new things that you’ve come up with? And what’s next for you? And if you want to talk about your new book?

Geoff Manaugh
Yeah, it’s funny. I mean, I think writing an actual sequel was probably not something that that I would undertake, but I do think maybe like an expanded edition or a second edition, you know, looking back even at some of the crimes that are in the book, you know, just sort of catching people up with what happened to those people, It would be fascinating, you know, and as you mentioned, I mean, there’s just been so many hundreds, if not thousands of crimes since then that might be worth looking into. You know, I have actually kind of continued this sort of reporting, just in terms of freelance journalism and just one recent case, you know, I won’t go into too much detail on but a, which easily could have been a chapter in the book, was I learned from a safecracker here in Los Angeles. An illegal safecracker, so if you get locked out of your safe or if a bank you know, as a safe and they can’t get into it because they be, you know, something, the lock broke or there’s something something has gone wrong, or you’ll call people like this who will show up and they can drill the safe they can get into it, You know, there’s a lot of technology for getting through safe doors. In any case, I was following him around Los Angeles for about six months and wrote a profile of the safe cracking industry through him. But he’s kept telling me about this case in Florida. You know, that was just totally fascinating. It was about a safecracker who had basically gone… gone rogue. It was somebody who you would hire you know, to like if you’re, say a family member dies and they’re the only person that knows the combination to the safe in your house, you know, it was this it was this kind of person that you would call and he would get you out of a tight spot. He decided… this guy in Florida, you know, decided to use his skills to become a… basically a super burglar and so he teamed up with some other people, one of them who used to be a law enforcement officer actually. One of them was a pilot, and so they actually had an aeroplane. They would fly around the United States, mostly the Southeast and they would rob jewellery stores. They occasionally would hit supermarkets as well because there’s a lot of cash in supermarkets. I love this idea of a burglary crew. It’s just crazy, you know, where they have their own aeroplane and you know, there are former cops and safe crackers and you know, if they’re just flying around the country, robbing hundreds and hundreds of thousands of  dollars worth of goods and it seemed like a story I really wanted to learn more about so I was actually able to speak with one of the people in the burglary crew you know, I met some of their victims, which I think was a really important aspect of this kind of story. I mean, this this crime, these these types of crimes, property crimes, you know, looting and theft, not victimless crimes, and often they aren’t there the damage that they do aren’t covered by insurance companies and you can really ruin someone’s life, both professionally and certainly emotionally, you know, by by really kind of violating, you know, any sense of, you know, safety or security that might have and so that was something that I really wanted to include in that article. But yeah, I mean, that kind of thing, I think could have made, you know, a chapter in a rigorous guide to the city, but you know, maybe I’ll try to incorporate that into a future edition. In terms of new stuff. 

Yeah, I mean, there’s a bunch of stuff that’s that’s pretty fun that I’m that I’m that I’m working on now. You know, one thing that was interesting was that, you know, because of the nature of a burgers guide to the city, you know, looking at architecture and crime. The book was optioned for television. It never moved forward, which is sad, but it also meant that a bunch of people in Hollywood, you know, became interested in other pieces that I was working on and so I’ve had a couple projects that have been sort of options for Hollywood development. And one of those is a short story that is being filmed for Netflix, actually as we speak. So yeah, it’s super exciting. Actually. There’s a it’s a it’s a ghost story. It’s actually not burgers. It’s It was a short ghost story that I wrote for Halloween a couple years ago, and it’s now being filmed in New Orleans and I think it will be on Netflix, maybe by the late summer of 2022. Although the release date isn’t clear yet. I’ve been working on some film stuff and some TV stuff, which has been really exciting and kind of moving out of the architecture world. But then having said that, yeah, there’s this new quarantine book that my wife and I just wrote, I guess the short version of that is that it basically looks at quarantine kind of the way Virgos guide to the city looks at Burger, you know, which is that Quarantine is a is a way of using architecture to prevent a disease from spreading. And so we went down the rabbit hole of looking at you know, what Quarantine is what its, you know, its origins and during the Black Death, and how it has shaped the built environment, you know, because quarantine if you really look at as it’s affected international borders, it’s affected, You know, our passports today, obviously affected the built environments and then with COVID-19 We also saw that it is, you know, can really kind of change people’s lives. And so the quarantine book just came out two months ago, and well the paperback will be out next summer and that’s also been a really interesting way to I guess look at the built environment or look at urban design.

Vaissnavi Shukl
I think “came out” is an understatement. I think you should say, “came out with bells and whistles, to great reviews from literally all major newspapers and publishing boards.”  I personally can’t wait to get my hands on it. Because that’s something that it’s something everybody was was asked at the time of me grad school and a lot of students projects and students forums were talking about the architecture of isolation and there were a lot of these Instagram blogs that are you know, you could submit your rooms such as like everybody sketching out their rooms and how you’re moving about the room throughout the day. So it just made people think about architecture in a very different way. And something that I personally noticed from applying to, I have lost count of how many jobs I applied for that summer, in terms of applying for jobs was that while all the big firms were struggling in terms of keeping up and keeping their staff number following people laying off people. There was a sudden rise, a small rise but still a sudden rise in the hiring practices of very small boutique firms who were designing single family weekend homes. And I found that fascinating, because I was you know, you would apply to the usual places but none of them are hiring me like okay, and then wanting that I would log into Harvard’s career website and there would be this beautiful little boutique firms based out of LA based out of Hamptons based out of Provincetown, based out of suburbs in different states and they would be building gorgeous houses like expensive courses, houses, and they were all hiring and I was like, “Wow, what does it say about architecture very broadly, where all these large infrastructure projects are all on hold right now.” You know, the funding has been taken back. It’s all been redirected into COVID relief and everybody who could afford to certainly felt that they need to get… They needed to get out of the city and they needed to have a space where they could breathe fresh air. I think that’s what it comes down to is just having that real estate where you could step out and get good and not be restricted to the four walls. So I’ve been waiting for the book and I can’t wait for it to release in India so that I can have a look at it.

Geoff Manaugh
Now that’s… that’s fascinating observation, actually. Yeah, the… the hiring practices of different scale architecture firms might indicate something about the state of society at a given moment. I think that’s really interesting.

Vaissnavi Shukl
Yeah, but hey Geoff this was an absolute joy. I don’t say I don’t use the word joy. Enough after recording an episode. But it was a… it was an absolute delight and joy to speak to you. And I can already tell if you’re on board with me, I’m going to reach out to you because I know at some point we’re going to do a season or like post post post pandemic design, whatever that and we would love to talk about your next book in that.

Geoff Manaugh
Yeah, that’d be great. I would look forward to it. Yeah, I enjoyed the conversation as well. Thanks for the interest in it forward to the episode. Thank you so much. All right. Great. Yeah. Take care.

Vaissnavi Shukl
Special thanks to Ayushi Thakur for the research and design support, and Kahaan Shah for the background score. For guests and topic suggestions, you can get in touch with us through instagram or our website through our website archoffcentre.com, both of which are ‘archoffcentre’. And thank you for listening.