Early on in A Burglar’s Guide to the City, Geoff Manaugh’s transporting and transformative book on the criminal uses of urban space, I met Bill Mason. Mason is a jewel thief, yes, but also a “watcher of buildings”. He’s pretty much a reader of buildings.
Bomb Rush Cyberfunk reviewPublisher: Team ReptileDeveloper: Team ReptilePlatform: Played on SwitchAvailability: Out now on PC, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5,Xbox One, Xbox X/S and Switch.
Mason started out in real estate, and became intrigued by the apartments he was showing clients. “I liked buildings,” he told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer in 2005. Why does he like them? Because, “you could go in and achieve something, bypass a lot of security. And it was a game, it became a challenge, a sort of adrenalin rush I got addicted to.” Mason became a jewel thief, in other words, because of something that sounds a lot like a form of love.
A reader of buildings! Mason would wander, often at night, reading the faces of the buildings he passed. He was looking for useful ledges, easy windows, rooftops he could reach at a push. It was a process of finding useful details, and then chaining them together to create a path. I know this feeling. I was doing it last week.
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Millennium Square, New Amsterdam, in the pitiless mid-day sun. Sega blue skies overhead and bleached, scorching concrete, but I’ve been asked to tag a billboard on the side of a tower that looms high above me. Too high? I need to tag this billboard to move on, but I’ve been circling the building for hours, and I can’t work out how to get onto the first floor, let alone the fifth.
But maybe, as Mason would suggest, I’m starting with the wrong building. I’m starting with the target. What’s nearby? A run of low offices, suspended over an entrance to the square itself. No good on one side, but on the other I see an interrupted series of railings that I could probably skate across. Where do they lead? What leads to them in the first place? And working back, how do I find a way to ?