How to Build Impossible Things
A Carpenter's Notes on Life & the Art of Good Work
'Like sitting in a room with Mark and hearing the best stories in the world, wound up with wisdom, craft, and hard-won philosophy' Burkhard Bilger, The New Yorker
'A brilliantly engaging storyteller, laugh-out-loud funny, loving, cheekily smug.... An enjoyable read on making, inventing and what might contribute to a life worth living' Julie Mehretu, Painter
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Over the past forty years, Mark Ellison has worked on some of the most beautiful homes you've never seen, specializing in rarefied and challenging projects with the most demanding of clients. He built a staircase a famed architect called a masterpiece. He worked on the iconic Sky House, which Interior Design named the best apartment of the decade. He's even worked on the homes of David Bowie, Robin Williams, and others whose names he cannot reveal. He is regarded by many as the best carpenter in New York.
But before he was any of that, Ellison was just 'a serial dropout' who spent his young adult years taking work where he found it and sleeping on couches.
In How to Build Impossible Things, Ellison tells the story of his unconventional education in the world of architecture and design, and how he learned the satisfaction and joy that comes from doing something well for a long time. He takes us on a tour through the lofts, penthouses, and townhouses of New York's elite which he has transformed over the years - before they're camera-ready - and offers a window into what he's learned about living meaningfully along the way. Scrapped blueprints and last-minute demands characterise life in the high-stakes world of luxury construction. From staircases that would be deadly if built as designed to algae-eating snails boiled to escargot in a penthouse pond, Ellison exposes the messy wiring behind the pristine walls - and the mindset that any of us can develop to build our own impossible things. Review Like sitting in a room with Mark and hearing the best stories in the world, wound up with wisdom, craft, and hard-won philosophy -- Burkhard Bilger ― The New Yorker
A brilliantly engaging storyteller, laugh-out-loud funny, loving, cheekily smug . . . An enjoyable read on making, inventing and what might contribute to a life worth living -- Julie Mehretu
Mark is an amazing polymath - and an Olympic-level aesthete. Unlike many polymaths and aesthetes, though, when he gets up in the morning, it's to make real, physical things - including this book -- Craig Nevill-Manning, Engineering Director, Google NYC
On a job site Mark makes irreverent banter while scribbling measurements on the back of pizza box as works of astonishing complexity and precision materializes under his direction. Now he has somehow applied this same deceptively offhand but exacting craft to unspooling this collection of tales from his ascent to the summit of one of the most demanding construction habitats on earth -- David Hotson, architect, Skyhouse and Pinnacle About the Author Mark Ellison is regarded by many as the best carpenter in New York. A man with an affinity for challenging work, he has designed and constructed some of New York's most elaborate and expensive homes, and been profiled in the New Yorker. But, as a native of the old steel town Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, his route into the building trade and the mastery of a craft was unexpected, moving from construction labourer to helper and finally to carpenter. Now, at the age of sixty, he has written his first book.
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