Building
A Carpenter's Notes on Life & the Art of Good Work
by Mark Ellison
This title was previously available on NetGalley and is now archived.
Send NetGalley books directly to your Kindle or Kindle app
1
To read on a Kindle or Kindle app, please add kindle@netgalley.com as an approved email address to receive files in your Amazon account. Click here for step-by-step instructions.
2
Also find your Kindle email address within your Amazon account, and enter it here.
Pub Date May 16 2023 | Archive Date Sep 30 2023
Random House Publishing Group - Random House | Random House
Talking about this book? Use #Building #NetGalley. More hashtag tips!
Description
“This book is for people who are interested in doing anything well.”―Sam Sifton, The New York Times
Winner of the Inc. Non-Obvious Book Award
For forty years, Mark Ellison has worked in the most beautiful homes you’ve never seen, specializing in rarefied, lavish, and challenging projects for the most demanding of clients. He built a staircase that the architect Santiago Calatrava called a masterpiece. He constructed the sculpted core of Sky House, which Interior Design named “Apartment of the Decade.” His building projects have included 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.
Building: A Carpenter’s Notes on Life & the Art of Good Work tells the story of an unconventional education and how fulfillment can be found in doing something well for decades. Ellison takes us on a tour of the lofts, penthouses, and townhomes of New York’s elite, before they’re camera-ready. In a singular voice, he offers a window into learning to live meaningfully along the way. From staircases that would be deadly if built as designed and algae-eating snails boiled to escargot in a penthouse pond, to the deceptive complexity of minimalist design, Building exposes the tangled wiring, scrapped blueprints, and outlandish demands that characterize life in the high-stakes world of luxury construction.
Blending Ellison’s musings on work and creativity with immersive storytelling and original sketches, photos, and illustrations, Building is a meditation on crafting a robust life, and a delightful philosophical inquiry beyond the facades that we all live behind.
Advance Praise
“Mark Ellison is known for building beautiful rooms, but here he has crafted a gorgeous book. It’s a cross between Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and Kitchen Confidential and it contains fascinating insights about working with your hands, the nature of talent, and how to create a meaningful life, whatever your craft is. Oh, and lots of juicy stories of pain-in-the-ass clients. Even if you aren’t handy—I can barely hang a picture frame—you’ll find this book a wonderful read.”
—A.J. Jacobs, bestselling author of The Puzzler: One Man’s Quest to Solve the Most Baffling Puzzles Ever, from Crosswords to Jigsaws to the Meaning of Life
“Who knew Mark Ellison’s handiwork would include a book this exquisite, purposeful, absorbing? Building merits reading and re-reading — it’s a book with much to teach us all.”
—Ayad Akhtar, Pulitzer prize–winning author of Homeland Elegies
“Reading this amazing book is like sitting in a room with a very wise and very funny man, hearing the best stories in the world, wound up with wisdom, craft, and hard-won philosophy, and told with such eloquence. Clearly, Ellison had this book waiting inside him for years. I’m so glad that it’s out in the world, where it will find its readers for years.”
—Burkhard Bilger, author of Fatherland
“On a job site, Ellison will make irreverent banter while scribbling measurements on the back of pizza box as work of astonishing complexity and precision materializes under his direction and vision. Now he has somehow applied this same deceptively offhand but exacting craft to unspooling this collection of tales about his ascent to the summit of one of the most demanding construction habitats on earth. Building is absolutely fantastic.”
—David Hotson, architect, Skyhouse
“Mark Ellison 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. Some lucky people get to live in them. Now, though, the whole world gets to share in his wisdom.”
—Craig Nevill-Manning, Engineering Director, Google
Available Editions
| EDITION | Other Format |
| ISBN | 9780593449127 |
| PRICE | $28.99 (USD) |
| PAGES | 304 |
