For the past several years, I?ve been writing a book about the relationship between burglary and architecture. Burglary, as it happens, requires architecture: it is a spatial crime. Without buildings, burglary, in its current legal form, could not exist. Committing it requires an inside and an outside; it?s impossible without boundaries, thresholds, windows, and walls. In fact, one needn?t steal anything at all to be a burglar. In a sense, as a crime, it is part of the built environment; the design of any structure always implies a way to break into it.

You can see burglary?s architectural connections anywhere. Watch nearly any heist film, for example, and at some point there will be an architectural discussion: inevitably, the characters will point at floor plans or lean in close to study maps, arguing over how to get from one room to another, whether or not two buildings might actually be connected, or how otherwise separate spaces and structures?sometimes whole neighborhoods?might be secretly knit together. Seen this way, heists are the most architectural genre of all.
[Image: ?How The Burglar Gets Into Your House? (1903), via The Saint Paul Globe].

When a burglary is committed in the real world, you often see stunned business owners stammering to morning TV crews about how strange the burglars? method of entry was. They came in through the walls or jumped down through a hole in the ceiling?or crawled in through a drop-off chute?rather than going through the f...