There is something irresistible about a behind-the-scenes glimpse into another world, especially one that is remote to most of us and has a veneer of unattainable and immaculate perfection. Mark Ellison has spent his career as carpenter (“the best carpenter in New York City”), welder, sculptor, contractor, cabinet maker, inventor, and industrial designer to the ultra-wealthy. Building: A Carpenter’s Notes on Life & the Art of Good Work, published last month, is the builder’s equivalent of those tell-all nanny books that gleefully expose the excesses of their clientele. We’ve all seen the spreads in Architectural Digest or on social media: one-of-a-kind, improbably luminous interiors that look as though they were conjured into existence directly from the owner’s fevered imagination. Building charts out the immense, invisible labor that bridges vision and finished product.
When Ellison shows up for a job for the first time, it’s often into an apocalyptic landscape of ripped out walls, tangled wires, ducts, transformers, and rusted pipes in old buildings with uneven floors and no right angles. From this, a vaste horde of workers of varying levels of skill spend months constructing, say, a minimalist apartment in which every surface is veneered identically with six-inch strips of elm cut from a single tree, such that the illusion of uniformity will be ruined if there is a millimeter’s variance where elements meet. Yes, as he notes, “the window, its surrounding frame, the stone sill, and the woodwork are all made in different shops, none of whom communicate with one another.” In every case, it feels like a miracle when the vision is achieved.
The fun (for the reader) comes from everything that goes wrong - as everything inevitably does - on the hellish journey from chaos to order. This journey is marked by outrageous characters, mishaps of all kinds, and some staggeringly bad ideas. The story of the penthouse deck, the Colorado river rocks, three crates of snails, and a cleaner named Kevin is worth the price of the book alone.
These anecdotes are interleaved with memoir and reflection. Ellison recounts his beginnings as aimless youth and beginning carpenter through his subsequent rise up the ranks of the high-end building world. Late in his career he would be called by clients who had been given his name because no one else could figure out how to do the job. Now, poised on the brink of retirement, he turns his thoughts to what he might build in freedom in a “workshop of wonders.”
Looking back on his life and work, he attempts to distill the lessons they taught. Chapter titles include “Belief,” “Absurdity,” “Practice,” “Fear/Failure,” and “Friendship and Death.” He ruminates on the brokenness of the world and on our resistance to bliss and ecstasy: “We are hard nuts who resent being cracked. It hurts, and disturbs our sleep.” A final exhortation closes the book: “Work hard. Love easily. I will do the same.” Building: A Carpenter’s Notes on Life & the Art of Good Work is a diverting meditation on making and living by a man who bristles with experience and character on every page.
Jared is an adult services librarian at the Howe Library in Hanover. He purchases a range of nonfiction for the library and conspires with a colleague to devise the library’s programming. When otherwise free, he’s usually in the mountains, swimming in local ponds and rivers, trying his hand at new cuisines, reading, or dreaming of walking the Scottish Highlands.