Agatha Christie said, "It is ridiculous to set a detective story in New York City. New York City is itself a detective story."
The Case of the Elusive Room is the mystery that has plagued the city over the crime committed by architects in believing that the room and the city are mutually exclusive. Architect's categorise space according to scale. To challenge this segregation of scales we journey in search of the elusive room that collapses the city into an interior.
Inspired by Dennis Wheatley’s 1930s murder mysteries, the project is documented as a case file that collects spatial clues to resolve how the city fleetingly collapsed into an interior to help solve the crime of why the room and city have since been separated again.
Manhattan DID exist within a room in the late 1970s. A victim of urban flight, its inhabitants had fled to the outer boroughs and suburbs due to rampant violence and crime. It was then that Rem Koolhaas came to Manhattan to catalogue the cadaver that remained. Through Delirious New York, even Koolhaas fell victim to the architect’s pitfall of reverting to the known conventions of scalar segregation. The city was now a formal exercise in desperate need of crowds to reanimate its empty skyscrapers.