Building: A Carpenter's Notes on Life & the Art of Good Work by Mark Ellison

A brilliant carpenter shares meditations on work, creativity, and design, revealing powerful lessons on building a meaningful life based on his experience constructing some of New York’s most iconic spaces.Over the past forty years, Mark Ellison has worked on some of the most beautiful homes you've never seen, specializing in the most rarefied, lavish, and challenging of projects with the most demanding of clients. He built a staircase that the famed architect Santiago Calatrava 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 living in a string of cockroachy apartments, taking work where he found it, and sleeping on couches between gigs, feeding himself by makin