“Inner City,” an exhibit by sculptor Arnie Zimmerman, opens Friday at the RISD Museum’s new Chace Center gallery in Providence.

Courtesy of Arnie Zimmerman

PROVIDENCE — When New York artist Arnie Zimmerman first exhibited his sprawling mini-metropolis “Inner City” in 2007, the entire installation consisted of about 100 pieces. On Friday, when “Inner City” opens a three-month run at the RISD Museum, it will boast more than 200 pieces, ranging from pint-size streets and bridges to knee-high factories and apartment buildings.

An example of urban sprawl on a small scale?

“Actually, I’m having too much fun to stop,” Zimmerman says with a laugh. “When I started working on the project, I figured that it would last a year, maybe two. But it hasn’t turned out that way. Every time the show travels to a new venue, I keep making more stuff.”

At RISD, Zimmerman faced his biggest challenge yet.

Rather than installing “Inner City” in one of its cozy older galleries, the museum will display the work in its new Chace Center gallery — the same hangar-size space that housed last year’s “Chihuly at RISD” blockbuster. In response, Zimmerman has added several new pieces, including a multi-part bridge that evokes classic 19th-century spans like the Brooklyn Bridge.

Zimmerman, whose studio is located in Brooklyn, says he enjoyed the challenge of making something as complex as a bridge in his signature material: clay.

“It turned out to be pretty complicated. I mean, you usually think of bridges as being these very elegant, but also very straightforward, examples of engineering. But trying to capture that elegance and simplicity in a medium like clay was difficult.”

Then again, it was precisely for that reason — to push himself and his medium — that Zimmerman first started working on “Inner City.”

A well-known sculptor and ceramic artist, he first made a name for himself in the mid-1980s with a series of works that combined the size and scale of contemporary sculpture with traditional pottery forms such as urns and vases.

A decade later, Zimmerman decided to reverse course: rather than making small things larger, he started making large things smaller. He also started paying closer attention to his surroundings, especially after spending several years living and working in Lisbon, Portugal.

“I’ve spent most of my life living in cities, so obviously I like them,” Zimmerman says. “There’s the energy, the variety, the dynamism. At the same them, there’s also a lot of history. Just walking down the street in Manhattan, for example, you might see a 1960s-era office tower standing next to a building from the 1920s that’s modeled on the design of a Renaissance palazzo.”

In “Inner City,” Zimmerman tried to capture some of the energy and vitality he observed in real cities.

Rather than adopting a single architectural style, for example, he looked at a variety of building types — everything from anonymous warehouses and factories to turn-of-the-century apartment houses to contemporary office buildings.

He also created his own infrastructure, including several bridges that wend their way through the exhibit just as they do in real life.

At the same time, Zimmerman deliberately avoided trying to re-create a specific city. Instead, “Inner City” happily channels a variety of urban styles and periods, ranging from Jazz Age New York to Weimar-era Germany (Zimmerman is a fan of the minimalist-industrial style associated with Germany’s Bauhaus movement) to the gritty urban look of the Industrial Revolution.

“It’s really meant to be a kind of generalized, generic city,” Zimmerman says. “Obviously, there are some similarities to actual cities, notably New York. But I really had no interest in creating tiny versions of the Flatiron Building or the Chrysler Building. That’s not what I was after.”

Like the time-tripping buildings, the residents of “Inner City” seem to have wandered in from a variety of different eras. They include a group of girder-toting construction workers, a prison chain gang and several beggars who look like refugees from a Dickens novel.

“At first, I wasn’t sure I wanted any kind of figurative element,” Zimmerman says. “But once I started making the figures, I absolutely loved it. To make things like arms, legs and hands, you really have to work the clay in a way that’s different from the more geometric stuff.”

Though playful in style, the figures also serve a larger social and artistic purpose, according to the RISD Museum’s contemporary art curator, Judith Tannenbaum.

“On the one hand, they help put a human face on what is otherwise a pretty gritty-looking place,” Tannenbaum says. “On the other hand, they’re very much a reflection of that place, in the sense that they obviously have to work hard to make a living, legally or not.”

For the RISD show, Zimmerman is once again working with his frequent collaborator, Portuguese architect Tiago Montepegado. The two met in 2007, when Montepegado was hired to oversee the first installation of “Inner City” at a museum in Lisbon.

Since then, the two artists have collaborated on several projects — this despite the fact that Zimmerman is based in New York and Montepegado in Lisbon.

“Basically, we spend a lot of time sending each other e-mails,” Zimmerman says.

Among other things, Montepegado designed the show’s largest single element — an elevated ramp that wraps around two sides of the Chace Center gallery.

According to Zimmerman, it’s the first time visitors will have the option of viewing “Inner City” from what amounts to a scenic overlook.

“It should be pretty cool,” he says.

“Arnie Zimmerman: Inner City” opens Friday at the RISD Museum, 224 Benefit St. in Providence.

bvansicl@projo.com