It’s always a mess before the drywall goes up, Ellison said. What looked like butchery was reconstructive surgery, the building’s bones and organs and circulatory system splayed open like a patient on an operating table. What seemed haphazard was in fact an intricate choreography of skilled workers and parts, scheduled months in advance and now brought together in a preordained sequence. It was the ordinary chaos of a construction site. On the fifth floor, under the soaring ceiling of a skylit studio, some exposed steel beams were getting a coat of paint, while carpenters built a bulkhead on the roof and stoneworkers scuttled by on scaffolds outside, restoring the brick-and-brownstone façade. A team of metalworkers was welding them into place, sending foot-long sparks into the air. Ducts and wires were going in here on the third floor, snaking under joists and along floorboards, while sections of a staircase were hoisted through a window on the fourth. He’s a man who gets hired to build impossible things.Ī floor below us, workers were shouldering sheets of plywood up a set of temporary stairs, sidestepping the half-finished tilework in the entryway. He’s a carpenter the way Filippo Brunelleschi, the architect of the great dome of the Florence Cathedral, was an engineer. Depending on the job, Ellison is also a welder, a sculptor, a contractor, a cabinetmaker, an inventor, and an industrial designer. “But I can build it.” Ellison is a carpenter-the best carpenter in New York, by some accounts, though that hardly covers it. “I can’t do the calculus on this, either,” he added, shrugging. It’s the tyranny of the orthogonal, Ellison says. But flat shapes are cheaper to mass-produce, and every sawmill and factory spits them out in uniform sizes: bricks, boards, drywall, tile. When buildings were still made by hand, the process would yield the occasional curve-igloos, mud huts, wigwams, yurts-and master builders earned their keep with arches and domes. We stack them side by side or on top of one another, like toddlers playing with blocks. Most houses are just collections of boxes, Ellison says. Straight lines are easy, curves are hard. “He’s a physicist, so I asked him, ‘Could you do the calculus for this?’ He said, ‘No.’ ” “I showed the drawings to the bass player in my band,” Ellison said. But getting them to do so in three dimensions was a nightmare. On paper, the rounded curves of one vault flowed smoothly into the elliptical curves of the other. One half of it was a barrel vault, like the inside of a Roman basilica the other half was a groin vault, like the nave of a cathedral. According to the architect’s plans, this room was to be the master bath-a cocoon of curving plaster shimmering with pinprick lights. He still wasn’t sure how to build this thing. Above him, joists, beams, and electrical conduits crisscrossed in the half-light like a demented spider’s web. Mark Ellison stood on the raw plywood floor, staring up into the gutted nineteenth-century town house.
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