Mark Furness / Theorymani brings an aluminum sculpture to Knoxville Park in Tennessee

Mark Furness activated a pastoral pocket in Knoxville

Artist and Architect Mark Fornes / Theorman One completes the sculpture Aluminum Installation at Pier 865, a historic park in Knoxville, Tennessee. The work sits within an established green space near Knoxville’s Old Town neighborhood, inviting to step away from the road and into the open air. Its position on a cast-in-place concrete pier gives visitors an elevated view across the park’s vegetation, and a change in perspective that feels urban and pastoral at the same time.

Marc Fornes designed Pier 865 with sensitivity to this layered context, creating an intervention that part reads, part shelters the landscape. The ghat rises outwards with a gentle rise, creating a continuous surface of benches, ledges and subtle changes in height that guide visitors to the canopy above.

The statue landed in a park near Knoxville’s Old Town neighborhood. Images © Steve Krudsma

Pier 865: Lightweight aluminum construction

Mark Furness and his Studio Theurman worked with his familiar system of painted aluminum, and assembled the palm-shaped strips into a lightweight structure in Knoxville, Tennessee. Each strip is pre-assembled and coated in a gradient of greens, blues, and buttery yellows to create a surface that aligns with the sky and surrounding trees without slipping into literal imitation.

Up close, the structure of these assembled facades presents a small field of seams and curves, and the shape of the canopy changes as visitors pass through it. From ground level, Pier 865 reads as a structure rising from concrete. From above, its continuous loops and long spans reveal a more directional geometry.

Pier 865 introduces a new approach to a historic Knoxville park Images © Steve Krudsma

Sculpture in public space in Tennessee

Designed by Mark Furness, the canopy rests on five slender supports that rise into three separate wings that span the pier in Knoxville, Tennessee. Their arrangement creates shadowy pockets where people congregate, while the oncoming loop draws others to its far reaches. A wing lifts to create a flexible stage-like area for performances and small events.

This interplay between the pier and the canopy gives the work a sense of structure-based movement. Frame views opening up to the mountains, while the changing hues of the colors accentuate the daylight. Visitors experience Peer 865 as a continuum of thresholds – sometimes exposed, sometimes sheltered – each calibrated by the rotating geometries of the project.

Although contemporary in appearance, the statue is consistent with a long cultural lineage in this Tennessee park, which has served as a local gathering place since the mid-1980s. This legacy has informed the project’s emphasis on community space open to the public.

Visitors find a series of shaded and open spaces under the canopy. Images © Steve Krudsma