Project Overview
Set within the vast and endangered volume of the Cranston Street Armory’s drill hall, this exhibition transformed a 38,000-square-foot void into a charged space of public encounter and creative expression. A rapid, site-responsive scaffolding system was used to construct temporary gallery spaces for a group art show, redefining a structure known for its historic grandeur as a platform for contemporary artistic experimentation.

Spatial Strategy
The primary challenge was scale. The armory’s soaring web trusses and cavernous enclosure dwarf human-scaled activities, creating a spatial dissonance between the architecture and the artwork. Rather than resist this monumental scale, the installation leverages it, diagonally slicing through the drill hall with a dense, angular scaffolding array that acts as both infrastructure and spatial frame.

Vertical scaffold elements pierce upward into the lofted volume, creating a sense of vertical continuity that connects the human scale of the artworks to the massive structural language above. This scaffold latticework locks into the existing armature of the armory itself, not by dominating it, but by anchoring moments of inhabitation within it. The resulting geometry operates at multiple scales simultaneously, housing artworks, forming circulation paths, and framing elevated perspectives.

Material Tactics and Construction Approach
The material palette was entirely drawn from donated, salvaged, and scavenged elements, industrial scaffolding, used barrels, construction fencing, traffic mitigation equipment, and projection materials. These components were recontextualized to form display surfaces, lighting supports, and circulation enclosures. The use of modular and mobile components allowed for rapid deployment and post-exhibition removal, highlighting the temporary nature of the intervention while respecting the armory’s fragile condition.

Installation was achieved with minimal tooling and volunteer labor, foregrounding the collaborative spirit of the event and the resourcefulness required for occupation of a space without conventional exhibition infrastructure.

Program and Collaboration
This project was developed in partnership with the Vanguard Group of Artists, Convergence International Art Festival, and the Providence Preservation Society. The installation provided a spatial framework for a multidisciplinary arts exhibition, including painting, photography, sculpture, video, and performance. The modularity of the scaffold system allowed curators to adapt the space as programming evolved, enabling fluid transitions between static exhibition and live activation.

Projection screens, suspended artworks, and layered soundscapes capitalized on the scaffold’s skeletal openness, turning it into both armature and amplifier. The exhibition not only filled the armory, but reactivated it, momentarily transforming an endangered civic relic into a spatial commons for cultural production.

Conclusion
The Construction of Art is an architectural improvisation, a light-footprint framework for creative occupation that resists permanence while asserting presence. By working with found materials and inserting a flexible scaffold logic into a historically rigid envelope, the project reveals how spatial precision and tactical reuse can reengage overlooked civic infrastructure. The installation was less a solution and more a proposal: a reminder of the power latent in big, empty buildings and the communities that are willing to reinhabit them.