Date of Award
Spring 5-22-2026
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Design (MDes) in Interior Studies / Exhibition + Narrative Environments
Department
Interior Architecture
First Advisor
Can Altay
Second Advisor
Francesca Liuni
Third Advisor
Nick Haus Heywood
Abstract
Providence is a city shaped by past industrial production, immigrant communities, artistic practice, waterfront renewal, and urban redevelopment. Its identity exists not only in historical remnants, but also in the cultural atmosphere created through the ongoing interaction between past and present. Former factories, river infrastructure, neighborhood streets, public parks and scenes of everyday life together form an urban narrative that continues to evolve. Yet existing methods of presenting Providence’s history and culture remain limited to informational signage, commemorative markers, or one-directional communication, offering little incentive for people to stop, read, explore, or actively engage. As a city rich in both local memory and contemporary vitality, Providence calls for a new mode of public exhibition—one that offers visitors, newcomers, and residents a meaningful entry point into the city’s cultural life through immersive and participatory experiences.
Inspiration for this project comes from Georges Perec’s Life: A User’s Manual. In the novel, the whole is not revealed via a single linear storyline, but gradually assembled through discrete spaces, fragmentary events, and everyday details. Readers move between rooms, perspectives, and stories, constructing their own understanding of a larger totality. This method provides a framework for rethinking how a city may be exhibited. Our understanding of a city rarely comes from one complete and centralized narrative, but is accumulated through fragments of streets, buildings, community activities, sounds, memories, and chance encounters. The city is not a linear museum, but an open text to be read, traversed, and reassembled.
Accordingly, this thesis proposes a distributed exhibition system across Providence, composed of twelve site-specific interventions that transform the city into an exhibition landscape to be read, experienced, and rediscovered. Rejecting the model of a single centralized museum, the project establishes a dispersed, non-linear, and freely explorable narrative structure. Each intervention responds to the spatial conditions, cultural identity, and urban context of its location while engaging themes such as industrial heritage, migration, artistic ecology, environmental justice, and urban resilience. Through walking, pausing, listening, observing, and participating, visitors gradually assemble their own cognitive map of Providence within real urban settings.
The project expands exhibition design beyond interior display into a form of urban spatial practice. Through lightweight structures, adaptive insertions, viewing platforms, sound media, and spatial thresholds, the twelve dispersed exhibition follies are organized into a continuous public experience system. Exhibition is no longer a container placed inside buildings, but an open medium that connects local culture, public space, and everyday life. The project proposes a new model of urban cultural communication: people enter the city through daily movement, understand it through exploration, and reconstruct a larger whole through fragmentary experiences. In this way, Providence is not only the subject of the exhibition—it becomes the exhibition itself.
Recommended Citation
Chen, Ye, "PROVIDENCE PUZZLE:Exhibition Design as Urban Spatial Practice" (2026). Masters Theses. 1585.
https://digitalcommons.risd.edu/masterstheses/1585
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