November 30, 2020 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is Burkhard Bilger’s excellent “Building the Impossible,” a profile of New York carpenter Mark Ellison – “a man who gets hired to build impossible things.” Bilger says of him,

He is a big man with heavy, sloped shoulders. He has thick wrists and meaty paws, a bald head and fleshy lips that protrude over a ragged beard. There is a bone-deep competence about him that reads as solidity: he seems built of denser stuff than other people. With his gruff voice and wide-set, watchful eyes, he can seem like a character out of Tolkien or Wagner: the clever Nibelung, fabricator of treasures. He loves machines and fire and precious metals. He loves wood and brass and stone. He bought a cement mixer and was obsessed with it for two years—couldn’t stop using it. What draws him to a project, he says, is the potential for magic, the unexpected thing. The glimmer of gems that veins the mundane.

Ellison renovates luxury New York apartments. Bilger visits several of them, including a gutted nineteenth-century townhouse (“Above him, joists, beams, and electrical conduits crisscrossed in the half-light like a demented spider’s web”), a ten-room triplex (“It was like stepping into a water lily. The door to the great room was shaped like a curling leaf, framing a swirling oval staircase behind it”), a five-story penthouse atop the Woolworth Building called the Pinnacle (“The ceiling was two stories high; the windows gave vaulting views across the city on every side. You could see the Palisades and the Throgs Neck Bridge to the north, Sandy Hook and the shores of Galilee, New Jersey, to the south. It was just a raw white space with some steel girders stretched across it, but it was still astonishing”), and, most memorably, a four-story penthouse known as the Sky House (“full of splintered, refracted spaces, as if you were walking inside a diamond”). 

Bilger’s description of Sky House is superb:

Yet the apartment feels less cerebral than exuberant, full of little jokes and surprises. The white floors give way to glass panels here and there, suspending you in the air. The steel girder that holds up the living-room ceiling is also a climbing pole, with a harness so guests can rappel down. The walls in the master bedroom and bath have tunnels hidden behind them, so the owners’ cats can crawl around and pop their heads through small openings. And all four floors are connected by a huge tubular slide, made of polished German stainless steel. At the top, cashmere blankets are provided to insure a fast, frictionless ride.

My favourite passage in "Building the Impossible" is Bilger’s description of Sky House’s staircase:

Built of white nanoglass—an opaque and extremely hard synthetic stone—it twists up through the building in precisely organized shards, offering sudden glimpses through the rooms unfolding around it.

That “twists up through the building in precisely organized shards” is delightful! The whole piece is delightful – as artfully crafted as the interiors it describes.