The burglar as architectural critic?
- Written by Naomi Stead, Associate professor, The University of Queensland
What occupation would be opposite to that of an architect? The answer might seem easy: a demolisher, someone who knocks buildings down. But there is another possibility: what if the opposite of an architect was a burglar?
If architects work to create a sense of safe enclosure, a managed separation between a protected interior realm and the threats of the wider world, a sense of redoubt, homeliness, security (in both its psychological and practical senses), then it is precisely this feeling of refuge that is breached by a burglar’s invasion.
FSG OriginalsI’ve been thinking of such things in relation to a new book by Geoff Manaugh, A Burglar’s Guide to the City (2016). Manaugh is most well known as founder and author of BLDGBLOG (read: Building Blog), one of the most popular and well subscribed (and also fabulously interesting and well-written) blogs around that address the built environment.
I say it’s about the built environment, rather than architecture per se, because BLDGBLOG describes itself as being about “Architectural Conjecture, Urban Speculation, and Landscape Futures”.
Unlike more conventional architectural blogs, it’s much less likely to be about a new building by a famous architect, than it is to be about
topics like weaponized climate modification, Greek mythology, strange infestations, narrative film, haunted house novels, paleontology, and so on.
The blog is fascinating partly because of these highly eclectic interests held by the author himself – it’s part futurism, part gadgety techno-utopianism, part gee-whiz boyish enthusiasm for cool ideas and things and people. It thus looks at buildings (amongst other things) in an unexpected light, from an unexpected direction, and this is also true of Manaugh’s new book.
The premise of the book is that burglars, even if they use their knowledge to nefarious ends, have an intimate understanding of buildings and the city. In this conception, burglary is a form of architectural criticism: using architecture against the intentions of its inhabitants (and its architects), but using it nevertheless. Examining the unique viewpoint of burglars enables a new understanding of the city and its buildings, from the dark side.
This approach is not entirely new. There’s a celebrated strand of avant garde urban theory which examines the creative misuse of the city by particular citizens: skateboarders for example, or parkour devotees, or, historically, members of the Situationist International, roaming through the streets in the deliberately aimless practice of dérive, or drifting.
Architectural culture has long had a fascination with such alternative, subversive, views of the city. Working to different rhythms and different ends, “city hackers” in all their various guises can be seen as resisting capitalist patterns of work and consumption, “playing” with buildings and urban space, looking askance at architecture. Manaugh clearly sees burglars as part of this lineage.
The book covers some fascinating territory. Manaugh opens with the story of George Leonidas Leslie who, trained as an architect, used his knowledge to undertake a spectacular crime spree in the New York of the 1860s-70s. Using his architectural skills, as well as his access to the wealthy echelons of society and equally to the tradies who would become part of his gang, Leslie was, Manaugh argues,“the greatest burglar of the nineteenth century.”
This opens Manaugh’s premise: that Leslie can be seen as “both burglary’s patron saint and architecture’s fallen superhero.” Speculating that for Leslie, “the best way to commune with an architectural space was by breaking into it,” Manaugh finds that:
his darkest accomplishment […] was hardwiring crime into architectural history, making burglary a necessary theme in any complete discussion of the city. Burglary is the original sin of the metropolis. Indeed, you cannot tell the story of buildings without telling the story of the people who want to break into them: burglars are a necessary part of the tale, a deviant counternarrative as old as the built environment itself.
So far, so interesting – and it is indeed a very intriguing book: well researched, lively in its prose and observations, original in conception.
Authors: Naomi Stead, Associate professor, The University of Queensland
Read more http://theconversation.com/the-burglar-as-architectural-critic-66031