BOOK REVIEW: GRAND THEFT AUTO: CRIME AND ARCHITECTURE BY ANGELO CARERI
Grand Theft Auto: Crime et architecture, Angelo Careri, with a preface by Mathieu Triclot and iconography by Leonardo Magrelli. Façonnage Éditions, 2026. 232 pages, €22. ISBN 978-2-491961-22-0. Published in French. Review copy supplied by the author. All images courtesy of Façonnage Éditions.
The first thing Grand Theft Auto teaches its players is how to flee.
A road out of town starts to look like an escape route before you have done anything worth escaping. Duck into an alley and the police lose their line of sight. Push into the hills, where the cars are worth more and so is the trouble that comes with taking one. Even the minimap, meant to help you get around, turns relentless pursuit into a diagram you can read at a glance.
Architecture is not scenery, décor or background.
Walter Benjamin, writing on buildings in The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, distinguished a structure’s optical reception, the concentrated gaze of a tourist before a façade, from its tactile reception, absorbed through habitual use rather than contemplation.
Grand Theft Auto turns tactile reception into gameplay itself. Nobody studies the grid of Los Santos the way a tourist studies a landmark. Its intersections and sightlines get learned by repetition instead, the way a body learns a staircase, until legibility turns into reflex.
Unlike the buildings Benjamin describes, this grid is watching back...
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