Date of Award
Spring 5-31-2025
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Design (MDes) in Interior Studies / Exhibition + Narrative Environments
Department
Interior Architecture
First Advisor
Jeffrey Katz
Second Advisor
Eduardo Benamor Duarte
Third Advisor
Can Altay
Abstract
Many urban structures fall into a “stranded” state—physically present, yet socially invisible. The Crook Point Bridge in Providence is a prime example: a decommissioned piece of industrial infrastructure, too large and symbolically heavy to vanish entirely, yet gradually fading from public awareness. This thesis explores how temporary, experience-driven interventions can reawaken the social relevance of such neglected spaces. Rather than proposing a fixed future, the project seeks to prompt public reconsideration through fleeting spatial experiences that require no irreversible transformation. The first intervention utilizes balloons—fragile, inflated, and inevitably collapsing—to embody the theme of accelerated disappearance, echoing how memories fade faster than we realize. In later phases, cyclone fencing is introduced as a contrasting material: representing slow erosion, accumulating physical and psychological boundaries over time while still bearing traces of human passage and resistance. Torn fences become visual thresholds, inviting viewers to look inward and experience decay not as absence, but as transformation. The exhibition unfolds through a series of staged phases, gradually wrapping, framing, and opening the abandoned bridge. The structure becomes both the site and subject of the exhibition. These temporary installations do not aim to restore or beautify, but to make visible the act of slow disappearance—challenging the bridge’s infrastructural permanence with softness, porosity, and transience. In the final stage, after the balloon exhibition and projected installations, the bridge is transformed into a temporary pavilion enclosed by a multi-layered cyclone fence, showcasing its layered history and memory. This thesis proposes temporality as a critical spatial strategy—one that softens perception, evokes memory, and catalyzes public dialogue. The project seeks not to determine the bridge’s final fate but to return it to the city’s cultural consciousness as an object of imagination, memory, and open-ended possibility.
Recommended Citation
Wang, Zhipeng, "Stranded in Time: Reawakening the Crook Point Bascule Bridge through Temporality" (2025). Masters Theses. 1396.
https://digitalcommons.risd.edu/masterstheses/1396
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