Name: Udit Desai's review of A Burglar's Guide to the City by Geoff Manaugh
Item: A Burglar's Guide to the City
Rating: 3.5
Author: Udit Desai

Geoff Manaugh

Encompassing nearly 2,000 years of heists and tunnel jobs, break-ins and escapes, A Burglar's Guide to the City offers an unexpected blueprint to the criminal possibilities in the world all around us. You'll never see the city the same way again. At the core of A Burglar's Guide to the City is an unexpected and thrilling insight: how any building transforms when seen through the eyes of someone hoping to break into it. Studying architecture the way a burglar would, Geoff Manaugh takes readers through walls, down elevator shafts, into panic rooms, up to the buried vaults of banks, and out across the rooftops of an unsuspecting city. With the help of FBI Special Agents, reformed bank robbers, private security consultants, the L.A.P.D. Air Support Division, and architects past and present, the book dissects the built environment from both sides of the law. Whether picking padlocks or climbing the walls of high-rise apartments, finding gaps in a museum's surveillance routine or discussing home invasions in ancient Rome, A Burglar's Guide to the City has the tools, the tales, and the x-ray vision you need to see architecture as nothing more than an obstacle that can be outwitted and undercut. Full of real-life heists-both spectacular and absurd-A Burglar's Guide to the City ensures readers will never enter a bank again without imagining how to loot the vault or walk down the street without planning the perfect getaway.

A Burglar's Guide to the City

Ziemek

Udit Desai

Safiya 

My house was burglarised once, and I can't dismiss the shock and trauma to feel utterly unsafe, helpless and fragile in a chaotic reality (which by then seemed to be a nonchalant way of putting things into perspective - All I know is that I went Kaput). But the way I've been robbed, had nothing to do with the genius/(roofman)/tunnel jobs ways I'd discover later on in this book. They simply hopped on the fence and forced the house's door open with huge rocks, and maybe some equipment unsuccessfully,but managed to find another way in through one window. If you still think that putting on steel frames on your windows would help, please think twice. 
Aaaaanyway.....
So when I started this book, I couldn't get rid of the assumption, that here lies a guide enlisting things to avoid while "architecting",... However I ended up drooling over all the exciting stories about famous burglars in the human history (not literally). I confess that it was refreshing, and that I was hopelessly trying to save someone time to carry on reading... It has all the ingredients for a heist movie: LAPD units, FBI agents, Police Officers, and the least expected scenarios.
I appreciated how it was subtly linking spatial features (urban or architectural wise) to blind spots that can eventually serve a burglar's attempt. If there's another title to be given to this book, would be to borrow" La dimension cachée" (Hidden dimension) from E.T Hall.

"The burglar is just a person—no, a genius!—who happens to use his or her talents in a morally troubling way. But we shouldn’t hold illegality against them—indeed, we should hold that for them, I thought I might argue, because we would never have discovered the true potential of the built environment had it not been for someone willing to break the rules. In fact, we should celebrate the burglar, this new archetype, this devil in the details of the built environment, a mythic figure who shows us what architecture, all along, could really be and, more important, how we should have been using it all along."

John Manoogian III

Nick Gracilla

Cristina P Miclea 

Lewis Martin

Katherine Hieber

Marsh Wu

Jason Porterfield

Maggie Delano

Colin O'Brien

Kevan Lee

Cameron Price-Austin

Joseph Keenan

K. Mike Merrill

Anna Pinto

Encompassing nearly 2,000 years of heists and tunnel jobs, break-ins and escapes, A Burglar's Guide to the City offers an unexpected blueprint to the criminal possibilities in the world all around us. You'll never see the city the same way again. At the core of A Burglar's Guide to the City is an unexpected and thrilling insight: how any building transforms when seen through the eyes of someone hoping to break into it. Studying architecture the way a burglar would, Geoff Manaugh takes readers through walls, down elevator shafts, into panic rooms, up to the buried vaults of banks, and out across the rooftops of an unsuspecting city. With the help of FBI Special Agents, reformed bank robbers, private security consultants, the LAPD. Air Support Division, and architects past and present, the book dissects the built environment from both sides of the law. Whether picking padlocks or climbing the walls of high-rise apartments, finding gaps in a museum's surveillance routine or discussing home invasions in ancient Rome, A Burglar's Guide to the City has the tools, the tales, and the x-ray vision you need to see architecture as nothing more than an obstacle that can be outwitted and undercut. Full of real-life heists--both spectacular and absurd--A Burglar's Guide to the City ensures that readers will never enter a bank again without imagining how to loot the vault or walk down the street without planning the perfect getaway.

Aaron Lewis

Marie C-D

Dan Turkel

Ziemek &
A Burglar's Guide to the City by Geoff Manaugh

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