The New Yorker / Building The Impossible
November 30, 2020
This week’s issue of The New Yorker. Building The Impossible. New York may be the hardest place in the world to do construction. There’s too little room to build anything and too much money with which to build it, and the combined pressure, like an architectural geyser, sends glass towers, Gothic skyscrapers, Egyptian temples, and Bauhaus slabs rocketing into the air. Mark Ellison is the man hired to build these impossible things. Visits to his Newburgh, NY workshop and two of his contrasting yet equally elaborate Manhattan projects by architects Angela Dirks and David Hotson. Photographs accompany an 8000 word text by Burkhard Bilger taking us deep through the mind and working world of an artist and artisan who loves carpentry “for how it gives free rein to the body’s physical intelligence.”