Mark Ellison stands on the raw plywood floor, gazing at this destroyed 19th-century townhouse. Above him, joists, beams, and wires criss-cross in half light, like a crazy spider web. He is still not sure how to build this thing. According to the architect’s plan, this room will become the main bathroom-a curved plaster cocoon, flashing with pinhole lights. But the ceiling doesn’t make any sense. Half of it is a barrel vault, like the interior of a Roman cathedral; the other half is a groin vault, like the nave of a cathedral. On paper, the rounded curve of one dome flows smoothly into the elliptic curve of the other dome. But letting them do this in three dimensions is a nightmare. “I showed the drawings to the bassist in the band,” Ellison said. “He is a physicist, so I asked him,’Can you do calculus for this?’ He said no.’”
Straight lines are easy, but curves are difficult. Ellison said that most houses are just collections of boxes. We put them side by side or stacked together, just like children playing with building blocks. Add a triangular roof and you are done. When the building is still hand-built, this process will produce occasional curves-igloos, mud huts, huts, yurts-and architects have won their favor with arches and domes. But mass production of flat shapes is cheaper, and each sawmill and factory produces them in a uniform size: bricks, wood boards, gypsum boards, ceramic tiles. Ellison said that this is an orthogonal tyranny.
“I can’t calculate this either,” he added, shrugging. “But I can build it.” Ellison is a carpenter—some say it is the best carpenter in New York, although this is barely included. Depending on the job, Ellison is also a welder, sculptor, contractor, carpenter, inventor and industrial designer. He is a carpenter, just like Filippo Brunelleschi, the architect of the Dome of Florence Cathedral, is an engineer. He is a man hired to build the impossible.
On the floor below us, workers are carrying plywood up a set of temporary stairs, avoiding the semi-finished tiles at the entrance. Pipes and wires enter here on the third floor, meandering under the joists and on the floor, while part of the staircase is hoisted through the windows on the fourth floor. A team of metal workers was welding them in place, spraying a foot-long spark into the air. On the fifth floor, under the soaring ceiling of the skylight studio, some exposed steel beams are being painted, while the carpenter built a partition on the roof, and the stonemason hurried past on the scaffolding outside to restore the brick and brown stone exterior walls. This is an ordinary mess on a construction site. What seems random is actually an intricate choreography composed of skilled workers and parts, arranged a few months in advance, and now assembled in a predetermined order. What looks like a massacre is reconstructive surgery. The bones and organs of the building and the circulatory system are open like patients on the operating table. Ellison said it’s always a mess before the drywall rises. After a few months, I couldn’t recognize it.
He walked to the center of the main hall and stood there like a boulder in a torrent, directing the water, motionless. Ellison is 58 years old and has been a carpenter for nearly 40 years. He is a big man with heavy shoulders and slanted. He has sturdy wrists and fleshy claws, bald head and fleshy lips, protruding from his torn beard. There is a deep bone marrow ability in him, and it is strong to read: he seems to be made of denser things than others. With a rough voice and wide, alert eyes, he looks like a character from Tolkien or Wagner: the clever Nibelungen, the treasure maker. He likes machines, fire and precious metals. He likes wood, brass and stone. He bought a cement mixer and was obsessed with it for two years-unable to stop. He said that what attracted him to participate in a project was the potential of magic, which was unexpected. The gleam of the gem brings the worldly context.
“No one ever hired me to do traditional architecture,” he said. “Billionaires don’t want the same old things. They want better than the last time. They want something that no one has done before. This is unique to their apartment and may even be unwise.” Sometimes this will happen. A miracle; more often not. Ellison has built houses for David Bowie, Woody Allen, Robin Williams, and many others for whom he cannot be named. His cheapest project cost about 5 million U.S. dollars, but other projects may swell to 50 million or more. “If they want Downton Abbey, I can give them Downton Abbey,” he said. “If they want a Roman bath, I will build it. I have done some terrible places-I mean, disturbingly terrible. But I don’t have a pony in the game. If they want Studio 54, I It will be built. But it will be the best Studio 54 they have ever seen, and some additional Studio 56 will be added.”
New York’s high-end real estate exists in a microcosm of itself, relying on strange nonlinear mathematics. It is free from ordinary constraints, like a needle tower that has been raised to accommodate it. Even in the deepest part of the financial crisis, in 2008, the super rich continued to build. They buy real estate at low prices and turn it into luxury rental housing. Or leave them empty, assuming the market will recover. Or get them from China or Saudi Arabia, invisible, thinking that the city is still a safe place to park millions. Or completely ignore the economy, thinking that it will not harm them. In the first few months of the pandemic, many people were talking about wealthy New Yorkers fleeing the city. The entire market was falling, but in the fall, the luxury housing market began to rebound: in the last week of September alone, at least 21 houses in Manhattan were sold for more than $4 million. “Everything we do is unwise,” Ellison said. “No one will add value or resell as we do with apartments. No one needs it. They just want it.”
New York is probably the most difficult place in the world to build architecture. The space to build anything is too small, the money to build it is too much, plus the pressure, just like building a geyser, glass towers, Gothic skyscrapers, Egyptian temples and Bauhaus floors fly into the air. If anything, their interior is even more peculiar-strange crystals form when the pressure turns inward. Take the private elevator to the Park Avenue residence, the door can be opened to the French country living room or the English hunting lodge, the minimalist loft or the Byzantine library. The ceiling is full of saints and martyrs. No logic can lead from one space to another. There is no zoning law or architectural tradition that connects the 12 o’clock palace with the 24 o’clock shrine. Their masters are just like them.
“I can’t find a job in most cities in the United States,” Ellison told me. “This job doesn’t exist there. It’s so personal.” New York has the same flat apartments and high-rise buildings, but even these may be placed in landmark buildings or wedged in oddly shaped plots, on sandbox foundations. Shaking or perching on stilts a quarter of a mile high. After four centuries of construction and razing to the ground, almost every block is a crazy quilt of structure and style, and every era has its problems. The colonial house is very beautiful, but very fragile. Their wood is not kiln dried, so any original planks will warp, rot or crack. The shells of the 1,800 townhouses are very good, but nothing else. Their walls may be only one brick thick, and the mortar was washed away by the rain. The buildings before the war were almost bulletproof, but their cast iron sewers were full of corrosion, and the brass pipes were fragile and cracked. “If you build a house in Kansas, you don’t have to care about this,” Ellison said.
Mid-century buildings may be the most reliable, but pay attention to those built after 1970. Construction was free in the 80s. Staff and workplaces are usually managed by mafia. “If you want to pass your work inspection, a person will call from a public phone and you will walk down with a $250 envelope,” Ellison recalled. The new building may be just as bad. In the luxury apartment in Gramercy Park owned by Karl Lagerfeld, the exterior walls are leaking severely, and some floors are rippling like potato chips. But according to Ellison’s experience, the worst is Trump Tower. In the apartment he renovated, the windows roared past, there were no weather strips, and the circuit seemed to be pieced together with extension cords. He told me that the floor is too uneven, you can drop a piece of marble and watch it roll.
Learning the shortcomings and weaknesses of each era is the work of a lifetime. There is no doctorate in high-end buildings. Carpenters don’t have blue ribbons. This is the closest place in the United States to the medieval guild, and the apprenticeship is long and casual. Ellison estimates that it will take 15 years to become a good carpenter, and the project he is working on will take another 15 years. “Most people just don’t like it. It’s too weird and too difficult,” he said. In New York, even demolition is an exquisite skill. In most cities, workers can use crowbars and sledgehammers to throw the wreckage into the trash can. But in a building full of wealthy, discerning owners, the staff must perform surgical operations. Any dirt or noise could prompt the city hall to call, and a broken pipe could ruin Degas. Therefore, the walls must be carefully dismantled, and the fragments must be placed in rolling containers or 55-gallon drums, sprayed to settle the dust, and sealed with plastic. Merely demolishing an apartment can cost one-third of the US$1 million.
Many co-ops and luxury apartments adhere to the “summer rules.” They only allow construction between Memorial Day and Labor Day, when the owner is resting in Tuscany or Hampton. This has exacerbated the already huge logistical challenges. There is no driveway, backyard, or open space to place materials. The sidewalks are narrow, the stairwells are dim and narrow, and the elevator is crowded with three people. It’s like building a ship in a bottle. When the truck arrived with a pile of drywall, it got stuck behind a moving truck. Soon, traffic jams, horns sounded, and the police are issuing tickets. Then the neighbor filed a complaint and the website was shut down. Even if the permit is in order, the building code is a labyrinth of moving passages. Two buildings in East Harlem exploded, triggering stricter gas inspections. The retaining wall at Columbia University collapsed and killed a student, triggering a new exterior wall standard. A little boy fell from the fifty-third floor. From now on, the windows of all apartments with children cannot be opened more than four and a half inches. “There is an old saying that building codes are written in blood,” Ellison told me. “It’s also written in annoying letters.” A few years ago, Cindy Crawford had too many parties and a new noise contract was born.
All the while, as workers navigate the city’s pop-up obstacles, and as the end of summer approaches, the owners are revising their plans to add complexity. Last year, Ellison completed a three-year, 42 million US dollar 72nd Street penthouse renovation project. This apartment has six floors and 20,000 square feet. Before he could finish it, he had to design and build more than 50 custom furniture and mechanical equipment for it-from a retractable TV above an outdoor fireplace to a child-proof door similar to origami. A commercial company may take years to develop and test each product. Ellison has a few weeks. “We don’t have time to make prototypes,” he said. “These people desperately want to enter this place. So I had a chance. We built the prototype, and then they lived in it.”
Ellison and his partner Adam Marelli sat at a makeshift plywood table in the townhouse, reviewing the schedule of the day. Ellison usually works as an independent contractor and is hired to build specific parts of a project. But he and Magneti Marelli recently joined forces to manage the entire renovation project. Ellison is responsible for the structure and finishes of the building — walls, stairs, cabinets, tiles and woodwork — while Marelli is responsible for overseeing its internal operations: plumbing, electricity, sprinklers and ventilation. Marelli, 40, received training as an outstanding artist at New York University. He devoted his time to painting, architecture, photography and surfing in Lavalette, New Jersey. With his long brown curly hair and slender hip urban style, he seems to be the strange partner of Ellison and his team-the elf among the bulldogs. But he was as obsessed with craftsmanship as Ellison. In the course of their work, they talked cordially between the blueprints and facades, the Napoleonic Code and the stepwells of Rajasthan, while also discussing Japanese temples and Greek vernacular architecture. “It’s all about ellipses and irrational numbers,” Ellison said. “This is the language of music and art. It’s like life: nothing is solved by oneself.”
This was the first week they returned to the scene three months later. The last time I saw Ellison was in late February, when he was fighting the bathroom ceiling, and he hoped to finish this work before summer. Then everything came to an abrupt end. When the pandemic began, there were 40,000 active construction sites in New York—almost twice the number of restaurants in the city. At first, these sites remained open as a basic business. In some projects with confirmed cases, the staff have no choice but to go to work and take the elevator on the 20th floor or more. It was not until late March, after workers protested, that nearly 90% of workplaces were finally closed. Even indoors, you can feel the absence, as if there is no traffic noise suddenly. The sound of buildings rising from the ground is the tone of the city—its heartbeat. It was deathly silence now.
Ellison spent the spring alone in his studio in Newburgh, just an hour’s drive from the Hudson River. He manufactures parts for the townhouse and pays close attention to his subcontractors. A total of 33 companies plan to participate in the project, from roofers and bricklayers to blacksmiths and concrete manufacturers. He doesn’t know how many people will return from the quarantine. Renovation work often lags behind the economy by two years. The owner receives a Christmas bonus, hires an architect and contractor, and then waits for the drawings to be completed, permits are issued, and the staff get out of trouble. By the time construction begins, it is usually too late. But now that office buildings all over Manhattan are empty, the board of co-ops has banned all new construction for the foreseeable future. Ellison said: “They don’t want a group of dirty workers carrying Covid to move around.”
When the city resumed construction on June 8, it set strict limits and agreements, backed by a fine of five thousand dollars. Workers must take their body temperature and answer health questionnaires, wear masks and keep their distance-the state limits construction sites to one worker per 250 square feet. A 7,000-square-foot venue like this can only accommodate up to 28 people. Today, there are seventeen people. Some crew members are still reluctant to leave the quarantine area. “Joiners, custom metal workers, and veneer carpenters all belong to this camp,” Ellison said. “They are in a slightly better situation. They have their own business and opened a studio in Connecticut.” He jokingly called them senior traders. Marelli laughed: “Those who have a college degree in art school often make them out of soft tissues.” Others left town a few weeks ago. “Iron Man returned to Ecuador,” Ellison said. “He said he will be back in two weeks, but he is in Guayaquil and he is taking his wife with him.”
Like many workers in this city, the houses of Ellison and Marelli were packed with first-generation immigrants: Russian plumbers, Hungarian floor workers, Guyana electricians, and Bangladeshi stone carvers. Nation and industry often come together. When Ellison first moved to New York in the 1970s, the carpenters seemed to be Irish. Then they returned home during the prosperity of the Celtic Tigers and were replaced by waves of Serbs, Albanians, Guatemalans, Hondurans, Colombians and Ecuadorians. You can track the conflicts and collapses of the world through the people on the scaffolding in New York. Some people come here with advanced degrees that are of no use to them. Others are fleeing death squads, drug cartels, or previous disease outbreaks: cholera, Ebola, meningitis, yellow fever. “If you are looking for a place to work in bad times, New York is not a bad landing place,” Marelli said. “You are not on a bamboo scaffolding. You will not be beaten or deceived by the criminal country. A Hispanic person can directly integrate into the Nepalese crew. If you can follow the traces of the masonry, you can work all day.”
This spring is a terrible exception. But in any season, construction is a dangerous business. Despite OSHA regulations and safety inspections, 1,000 workers in the United States still die at work every year—more than any other industry. They died of electric shocks and explosive gases, toxic fumes, and broken steam pipes; they were pinched by forklifts, machines, and buried in debris; they fell from roofs, I-beams, ladders, and cranes. Most of Ellison’s accidents occurred while riding a bicycle to the scene. (The first one broke his wrist and two ribs; the second one broke his hip; the third one broke his jaw and two teeth.) But there is a thick scar on his left hand that almost broke his hand. Saw it off, and he saw three arms being chopped off at the work site. Even Marelli, who mostly insisted on management, almost went blind a few years ago. When three fragments shot out and pierced his right eyeball, he was standing near a staff member who was cutting some steel nails with a saw. It was on Friday. On Saturday, he asked the ophthalmologist to remove the debris and remove the rust. On Monday, he returned to work.
One afternoon in late July, I met Ellison and Marelli on a tree-lined street on the corner of the Metropolitan Museum of Art on the Upper East Side. We are visiting the apartment where Ellison worked 17 years ago. There are ten rooms in a townhouse built in 1901, owned by entrepreneur and Broadway producer James Fantaci and his wife Anna. (They sold it for nearly 20 million U.S. dollars in 2015.) From the street, the building has a strong art style, with limestone gables and wrought iron grilles. But once we enter the interior, its renovated lines begin to soften into Art Nouveau style, with walls and woodwork bending and folding around us. It’s like walking into a water lily. The door of the large room is shaped like a curly leaf, and a revolving oval staircase is formed behind the door. Ellison helped establish the two and ensured that they matched each other’s curves. The mantelpiece is made of solid cherries and is based on a model sculpted by the architect Angela Dirks. The restaurant has a glass aisle with nickel-plated railings carved by Ellison and tulip flower decorations. Even the wine cellar has a vaulted pearwood ceiling. “This is the closest I have ever been to gorgeous,” Ellison said.
A century ago, building such a house in Paris required extraordinary skills. Today, it is much more difficult. It’s not just that those craft traditions have almost disappeared, but with it many of the most beautiful materials-Spanish mahogany, Carpathian elm, pure white Thassos marble. The room itself has been remodeled. The boxes that were once decorated have now become complex machines. The plaster is just a thin layer of gauze, which hides a lot of gas, electricity, optical fibers and cables, smoke detectors, motion sensors, stereo systems and security cameras, Wi-Fi routers, climate control systems, transformers, and automatic lights. And the housing of the sprinkler. The result is that a house is so complex that it may require full-time employees to maintain it. “I don’t think I have ever built a house for a client who is eligible to live there,” Ellison told me.
Housing construction has become the field of obsessive-compulsive disorder. An apartment like this may require more options than a space shuttle—from the shape and patina of each hinge and handle to the location of each window alarm. Some customers experience decision fatigue. They just can’t let themselves decide on another remote sensor. Others insist on customizing everything. For a long time, the granite slabs that can be seen everywhere on kitchen counters have spread to cabinets and appliances like geological molds. In order to bear the weight of the rock and prevent the door from being torn, Ellison had to redesign all the hardware. In an apartment on 20th Street, the front door was too heavy, and the only hinge that could support it was used to hold the cell.
As we walked through the apartment, Ellison kept opening the hidden compartments — access panels, circuit breaker boxes, secret drawers and medicine cabinets — each cleverly installed in plaster or woodwork. He said that one of the most difficult parts of the job is finding space. Where is there such a complicated thing? The suburban houses are full of convenient voids. If the air handler does not fit the ceiling, please tuck it into the attic or basement. But New York apartments are not so forgiving. “Attic? What the hell is the attic?” Marelli said. “The people in this city are fighting for more than half an inch.” Hundreds of miles of wires and pipes are laid between the plaster and studs on these walls, entwined like circuit boards. Tolerances are not too different from those of the yacht industry.
“It’s like solving a huge problem,” Angela Dex said. “Just figure out how to design all piping systems without tearing down the ceiling or taking out crazy chunks-it’s a torture.” Dirks, 52, has trained at Columbia University and Princeton University and specializes in residential interior design. She said that in her 25-year career as an architect, she has only four projects of this size that can pay such attention to detail. Once, a client even tracked her to a cruise ship off the coast of Alaska. She said that the towel bar in the bathroom was being installed that day. Can Dirks approve these locations?
Most owners can’t wait to wait for the architect to untie every kink in the piping system. They have two mortgages to proceed until the renovation is completed. Today, the cost per square foot of Ellison’s projects is rarely less than $1,500, and sometimes even twice as high. The new kitchen starts at 150,000; the main bathroom can run more. The longer the project duration, the price tends to rise. “I have never seen a plan that can be built in the way proposed,” Marelli told me. “They are either incomplete, they go against physics, or there are drawings that don’t explain how to achieve their ambitions.” Then a familiar cycle began. The owners set a budget, but the requirements exceeded their capacity. The architects promised too high and the contractors offered too low, because they knew the plans were a bit conceptual. The construction began, followed by a large number of change orders. A plan that took a year and cost a thousand dollars per square foot of the balloon length and twice the price, everyone blamed everyone else. If it only drops by a third, they call it a success.
“It’s just a crazy system,” Ellison told me. “The whole game is set up so that everyone’s motives are contradictory. This is a habit and a bad habit.” For most of his career, he didn’t make any major decisions. He is just a hired gun and works on an hourly rate. But some projects are too complicated for piecemeal work. They are more like car engines than houses: they must be designed layer by layer from the inside to the outside, and each component is precisely mounted to the next. When the last layer of mortar is laid, the pipes and wires under it must be completely flat and perpendicular to within 16 inches above 10 feet. However, each industry has different tolerances: the steelworker’s goal is to be accurate to half an inch, the carpenter’s precision is one-quarter inch, the sheeter’s precision is one-eighth of an inch, and the stonemason’s precision is one-eighth of an inch. One sixteenth. Ellison’s job is to keep them all on the same page.
Dirks remembers that he walked into him one day after he was taken to coordinate the project. The apartment had been demolished completely, and he spent a week in the dilapidated space alone. He took measurements, laid out the centerline, and visualized every fixture, socket and panel. He has drawn hundreds of drawings by hand on graph paper, isolated the problem points and explained how to fix them. The door frames and railings, the steel structure around the stairs, the vents hidden behind the crown molding, and the electric curtains tucked in window pockets all have tiny cross-sections, all gathered in a huge black ring binder. “That’s why everyone wants Mark or a clone of Mark,” Dex told me. “This document says,’I not only know what’s happening here, but also what’s happening in every space and every discipline.’”
The effects of all these plans are more pronounced than seen. For example, in the kitchen and bathroom, the walls and floors are inconspicuous, but somehow perfect. Only after you stared at them for a while did you discover the reason: every tile in every row is complete; there are no clumsy joints or truncated borders. Ellison considered these precise final dimensions when building the room. No tile must be cut. “When I came in, I remember Mark sitting there,” Dex said. “I asked him what he was doing, and he looked up at me and said,’I think I’m done.’ It’s just an empty shell, but it’s all in Mark’s mind.”
Ellison’s own home is located opposite an abandoned chemical plant in the center of Newburgh. It was built in 1849 as a boys’ school. It is an ordinary brick box, facing the roadside, with a dilapidated wooden porch in front. Downstairs is Ellison’s studio, where the boys used to study metalwork and carpentry. Upstairs is his apartment, a tall, barn-like space filled with guitars, amplifiers, Hammond organs and other band equipment. Hanging on the wall is the artwork that his mother lent him—mainly a distant view of the Hudson River and some watercolor paintings of scenes from her samurai life, including a warrior beheading his enemy. Over the years, the building was occupied by squatters and stray dogs. It was refurbished in 2016, shortly before Ellison moved in, but the neighborhood is still quite rough. In the past two years, there have been four murders in two blocks.
Ellison has better places: a townhouse in Brooklyn; a six-bedroom Victorian villa he restored on Staten Island; a farmhouse on the Hudson River. But the divorce brought him here, on the blue-collar side of the river, across the bridge with his ex-wife in the high-end Beacon, this change seemed to suit him. He is learning Lindy Hop, playing in a honky tonk band, and interacting with artists and builders who are too alternative or poor to live in New York. In January last year, the old fire station a few blocks from Ellison’s home went up for sale. Six hundred thousand, no food was found, and then the price fell to five hundred thousand, and he gritted his teeth. He thinks that with a little refurbishment, this might be a good place to retire. “I love Newburgh,” he told me when I went there to visit him. “There are weirdos everywhere. It hasn’t come yet-it’s taking shape.”
One morning after breakfast, we stopped at a hardware store to buy blades for his table saw. Ellison likes to keep his tools simple and versatile. His studio has a steampunk style—almost but not exactly the same as the studios of the 1840s—and his social life has a similar mixed energy. “After so many years, I can speak 17 different languages,” he told me. “I’m the miller. I’m the glass buddy. I’m the stone man. I’m the engineer. The beauty of this thing is that you first dig a hole in the soil, and then polish the last bit of brass with six thousand-grit sandpaper. To me, everything is cool.”
As a boy who grew up in Pittsburgh in the mid-1960s, he took an immersion course in code conversion. It was in the steel city era, and the factories were crowded with Greeks, Italians, Scots, Irish, Germans, Eastern Europeans, and southern blacks, who moved north during the Great Migration. They work together in open and blast furnaces, and then head to their own puddle on Friday night. It was a dirty, naked town, and there were many fish floating in the stomach on the Monongahela River, and Ellison thought this was exactly what the fish did. “The smell of soot, steam, and oil–that’s the smell of my childhood,” he told me. “You can drive to the river at night, where there are only a few miles of steel mills that never stop operating. They glow and throw sparks and smoke into the air. These huge monsters are devouring everyone, they just don’t know.”
His house is located in the middle of both sides of the urban terraces, on the red line between the black and white communities, uphill and downhill. His father was a sociologist and former pastor-when Reinhold Niebuhr was there, he studied at United Theological Seminary. His mother went to medical school and was trained as a pediatric neurologist while raising four children. Mark is the second youngest. In the morning, he went to an experimental school opened by the University of Pittsburgh, where there are modular classrooms and hippie teachers. In the afternoon, he and hordes of children were riding banana-seater bicycles, stepping on wheels, jumping off the side of the road, and passing through open spaces and bushes, like swarms of stinging flies. Every once in a while, he would be robbed or thrown into the hedge. Nevertheless, it is still heaven.
When we returned to his apartment from the hardware store, he played me a song he wrote after a recent trip to the old neighborhood. This is the first time he has been there in nearly fifty years. Ellison’s singing is a primitive and clumsy thing, but his words can be relaxing and tender. “It takes eighteen years for a person to grow up / another few years to make him sound good,” he sang. “Let a city develop for a hundred years / demolish it in just one day / the last time I left Pittsburgh / they built a city where that city used to be / other people may find their way back / but not me.”
When he was ten years old, his mother lived in Albany, which is how Pittsburgh was. Ellison spent the next four years in the local school, “basically to make the fool excel.” Then he experienced another kind of pain in the high school of Phillips College in Andover, Massachusetts. Socially, it was a training ground for American gentlemen: John F. Kennedy (Jr.) was there at the time. Intellectually, it is rigorous, but it is also concealed. Ellison has always been a hands-on thinker. He can spend a few hours to infer the influence of the earth’s magnetism on the flight patterns of birds, but pure formulas rarely get into trouble. “Obviously, I don’t belong here,” he said.
He did learn how to talk to rich people-this is a useful skill. And, even though he took time off during Howard Johnson’s dishwasher, Georgia tree planter, Arizona zoo staff, and Boston’s apprentice carpenter, he managed to enter his senior year. Nevertheless, he graduated just one credit hour. In any case, when Columbia University accepted him, he dropped out after six weeks, realizing that it was even more so. He found a cheap apartment in Harlem, posted mimeograph signs, provided opportunities to build attics and bookcases, and found a part-time job to fill the vacancy. When his classmates became lawyers, brokers, and hedge fund traders—his future clients—he unloaded the truck, studied banjo, worked in a bookbinding shop, scooped ice cream, and slowly mastered a transaction. Straight lines are easy, but curves are difficult.
Ellison has been in this work for a long time, so that its skills are second nature to him. They can make his abilities look weird and even reckless. One day, I saw a good example in Newburgh, when he was building stairs for a townhouse. The staircase is Ellison’s iconic project. They are the most complex structures in most homes—they must stand independently and move in space—even small mistakes can cause catastrophic accumulation. If each step is too low for 30 seconds, then the stairs may be 3 inches lower than the uppermost platform. “The wrong stairs are obviously wrong,” Marelli said.
However, the stairs are also designed to draw people’s attention to themselves. In a mansion like Breakers, the Vanderbilt couple’s summer house in Newport was built in 1895, and the stairs are like a curtain. As soon as the guests arrived, their eyes moved from the hall to the charming mistress in the robe on the railing. The steps were deliberately low-six inches higher instead of the usual seven and a half inches-to better allow her to slide down without gravity to join the party.
The architect Santiago Calatrava once referred to the stairs Ellison built for him as a masterpiece. This one didn’t meet that standard—Ellison was convinced from the beginning that it had to be redesigned. The drawings require that each step be made of a single piece of perforated steel, bent to form a step. But the thickness of steel is less than one-eighth of an inch, and nearly half of it is a hole. Ellison calculated that if several people walked up the stairs at the same time, it would bend like a saw blade. To make matters worse, the steel will produce stress fracture and jagged edges along the perforation. “It basically becomes a human cheese grater,” he said. That is the best case. If the next owner decides to move a grand piano to the top floor, the entire structure may collapse.
Ellison said: “People pay me a lot of money to make me understand this.” But the alternative is not that simple. A quarter of an inch of steel is strong enough, but when he bends, the metal still tears. So Ellison went one step further. He blasted the steel with a blowtorch until it glowed dark orange, then let it cool down slowly. This technique, called annealing, rearranges the atoms and loosens their bonds, making the metal more ductile. When he bent the steel again, there was no tear.
Stringers raise different types of questions. These are the wooden boards side by side with the steps. In the drawings, they are made of poplar wood and twisted like seamless ribbons from floor to floor. But how to cut the slab into a curve? Routers and fixtures can complete this job, but it takes a long time. The computer-controlled shaper can work, but a new one will cost three thousand dollars. Ellison decided to use a table saw, but there was a problem: the table saw could not cut curves. Its flat rotating blade is designed to slice directly on the board. It can be tilted to the left or right for angled cuts, but nothing more.
“This is one of the’don’t try this at home, kids!’ thing,” he said. He stood by the table saw and showed his neighbor and former apprentice Caine Budelman how to accomplish this. Budman is 41 years old: a British professional metal worker, blond man in a bun, loose manners, sporty demeanor. After burning a hole in his foot with a ball of molten aluminum, he left a casting job in nearby Rock Tavern and designed woodworking for safer skills. Ellison was not so sure. His own father had six fingers broken by a chainsaw-three times twice. “A lot of people will treat the first time as a lesson,” he said.
Ellison explained that the trick to cutting curves with a table saw is to use the wrong saw. He grabbed a poplar plank from a pile on the bench. He did not put it in front of the saw teeth like most carpenters, but put it next to the saw teeth. Then, looking at the confused Budelman, he let the circular blade spin, then calmly pushed the board aside. After a few seconds, a smooth half-moon shape was carved on the board.
Ellison was now in a groove, pushing the plank through the saw again and again, his eyes locked in focus and moving on, the blade rotated a few inches from his hand. At work, he constantly told Budelman anecdotes, narrations and explanations. He told me that Ellison’s favorite carpentry is how it controls the body’s intelligence. As a kid watching the Pirates at Three Rivers Stadium, he once marveled at how Roberto Clemente knew where to fly the ball. He seems to be calculating the precise arc and acceleration the moment it leaves the bat. It is not so much a specific analysis as it is a muscle memory. “Your body only knows how to do it,” he said. “It understands weight, levers, and space in a way your brain needs to figure out forever.” This is the same as telling Ellison where to place the chisel or whether another millimeter of wood must be cut. “I know this carpenter named Steve Allen,” he said. “One day, he turned to me and said,’I don’t understand. When I do this work, I have to concentrate and you are talking nonsense all day long. The secret is, I don’t think so. I came up with some Way, and then I’m done thinking about it. I don’t bother my brain anymore.”
He admitted that this was a stupid way of building stairs, and he planned to never do it again. “I don’t want to be called the perforated staircase guy.” However, if done well, it will have magical elements that he likes. The stringers and steps will be painted white with no visible seams or screws. The armrests will be oiled oak. When the sun passes over the skylight above the stairs, it will shoot light needles through the holes in the steps. The stairs seem to be dematerialized in the space. “This is not the house you should pour sour in,” Ellison said. “Everyone is betting whether the owner’s dog will step on it. Because dogs are smarter than people.”
If Ellison can do another project before retiring, it may be the penthouse we visited in October. It is one of the last unclaimed large spaces in New York, and one of the earliest: the top of Woolworth Building. When it opened in 1913, Woolworth was the tallest skyscraper in the world. It may still be the most beautiful. Designed by architect Cass Gilbert, it is covered with glazed white terracotta, decorated with neo-gothic arches and window decorations, and stands nearly 800 feet above Lower Manhattan. The space we visited occupies the first five floors, from the terrace above the last setback of the building to the observatory on the spire. Developer Alchemy Properties calls it Pinnacle.
Ellison heard about it for the first time last year from David Horsen. David Horsen is an architect with whom he often collaborates. After Thierry Despont’s other design failed to attract buyers, Hotson was hired to develop some plans and 3D models for Pinnacle. For Hotson, the problem is obvious. Despont once envisioned a townhouse in the sky, with parquet floors, chandeliers and wood-paneled libraries. The rooms are beautiful but monotonous-they can be in any building, not the tip of this dazzling, hundred-foot-tall skyscraper. So Hotson blew them up. In his paintings, each floor leads to the next floor, spiraling up through a series of more spectacular stairs. “It should cause wheezing every time it rises to every floor,” Hotson told me. “When you go back to Broadway, you won’t even understand what you just saw.”
The 61-year-old Hotson is as thin and angular as the spaces he designed, and he often wears the same monochrome clothes: white hair, gray shirt, gray pants, and black shoes. When he performed at Pinnacle with Ellison and me, he still seemed to be in awe of its possibilities—like a chamber music conductor who won the baton of the New York Philharmonic. An elevator took us to a private hall on the fiftieth floor, and then a staircase led to the large room. In most modern buildings, the core part of elevators and stairs will extend to the top and occupy most of the floors. But this room is completely open. The ceiling is two stories high; the arched views of the city can be admired from the windows. You can see Palisades and Throgs Neck Bridge to the north, Sandy Hook to the south and the coast of Galilee, New Jersey. It’s just a vibrant white space with several steel beams crisscrossing it, but it is still amazing.
To the east below us, we can see the green tile roof of Hotson and Ellison’s previous project. It is called the House of the Sky, and it is a four-story penthouse on a Romanesque high-rise building built for a religious publisher in 1895. A huge angel stood guard in every corner. By 2007, when this space was sold for $6.5 million—a record in the financial district at the time—it had been vacant for decades. There are almost no plumbing or electricity, only the rest of the scenes filmed for Spike Lee’s “Inside Man” and Charlie Kaufman’s “Synecdoche in New York.” The apartment designed by Hotson is both a playpen for adults and a dazzling noble sculpture-a perfect warm-up for Pinnacle. In 2015, the interior design rated it as the best apartment of the decade.
The Sky House is by no means a pile of boxes. It is full of space of division and refraction, as if you are walking in a diamond. “David, singing rectangular death in his annoying Yale way,” Ellison told me. However, the apartment does not feel as lively as it is, but full of little jokes and surprises. The white floor gives way to the glass panels here and there, letting you levitate in the air. The steel beam supporting the ceiling of the living room is also a climbing pole with safety belts, and guests can descend through ropes. There are tunnels hidden behind the walls of the master bedroom and bathroom, so the owner’s cat can crawl around and stick his head out of the small opening. All four floors are connected by a huge tubular slide made of polished German stainless steel. At the top, a cashmere blanket is provided to ensure fast, frictionless riding.
Post time: Sep-09-2021