YE CHEN

Providence Puzzles: Exhibition Design as Urban Spatial Practice

Providence is a city shaped by industrial production, immigrant communities, artistic practice, waterfront renewal, and urban redevelopment. Its identity is not held in a single place, but scattered across former factories, rivers, neighborhood streets, public parks, cultural institutions, and everyday encounters. Yet much of the city’s history is still presented through static signage, commemorative markers, or one-directional information, leaving limited space for people to pause, explore, and form their own connections.

Inspired by Georges Perec’s Life: A User’s Manual, this thesis understands the city as a puzzle assembled through fragments. Like Perec’s novel, where meaning emerges through rooms, objects, stories, and indirect connections, Providence can be read through a network of dispersed sites rather than a linear institutional narrative.

Providence Puzzles proposes a distributed exhibition system across the city, composed of twelve site-specific interventions. Each micro-exhibition responds to the spatial condition and cultural memory of its location, engaging themes of industrial heritage, migration, creative ecology, environmental justice, and urban resilience. Through walking, pausing, listening, observing, and participating, visitors gradually construct their own cognitive map of Providence.

The project expands exhibition design beyond the interior museum into an urban spatial practice. Through lightweight structures, viewing frames, sound media, adaptive insertions, and public thresholds, the city becomes both the subject and the medium of exhibition—an open landscape to be read, experienced, and reassembled.

Providence Puzzles: Twelve Fragments of the City

City of Making: Jewelry, Craft, and Urban Precision

City of Imagination: Art as Industrial Afterlife

City of Belonging: Daily Life Builds Community

City of Resilience: Changing the River, Changing the City