The Best Seat on Fort Worth Avenue

For about a month or so, I’ve been shadowing Erik Glissman and Nicole Horn as they build their unique Mobius Bench for Fort Worth Avenue.

Mobius Bench was the winning entry in the Fort Worth Avenue Devlopment Group’s Spare Parts competition. Entries were asked to utilized reclaimed materials and offer secondary functions such as shade, seating, or bike parking, for example.

Horn’s design is based off 19th century mathematician, August Ferdinand Möbius, who crafted the Mobius Strip:

Technical Terms: a non-orientable two-dimensional surface with only one side when embedded in three-dimensional Euclidean space.

Layman’s Terms: an infinite loop design.

Here’s how to make it via PBS’s  ZOOM — a program I contribute my successful childhood to.

Horn's rendition of Mobius Bench.

On Monday, the two began building the looping, roughly 8-feet tall by 10-feet wide structure that will come to rest in front of Chicken Scratch on Fort Worth Ave. Glissman said the piece will be installed by August 12 and finished on site by August 15.

This renditioning gives an idea of the complex structure of the coiling metal and wood that will loop overhead before descending into two wooden seats.

Check out this week’s Oak Cliff People for more about Horn and Glissman’s hunt for materials at area scrap yards, the process, and its future association with the area’s development.