Ellington was born in Clayton, North Carolina, trained at Drexel Institute and the University of Pennsylvania, then won a scholarship to the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris. He arrived in Asheville in 1926 at the height of a Florida-fueled mountain building boom and produced - in five remarkable years - three of the city's signature structures: City Hall, Asheville High School, and the First Baptist Church, all three rendered in his distinctive synthesis of Art Deco geometry with Beaux-Arts classical training. The city hall commission gave him a full plaza to work with. He used it to compress symbolism into form - the stepped octagonal roof, the pink Georgia marble base, the brick rising in subtle vertical bands.

The terra-cotta roof tiles came from Ludowici in Ohio, fired in shades of salmon and rose that catch the late afternoon sun and turn the entire upper third of the building the color of a tropical fish. Ellington layered pink Georgia marble, buff brick, and limestone trim - colors he chose to harmonize with the local mountains rather than impose a metropolitan vocabulary. The stepped roof references both Mayan revival pyramids (which were having a moment in 1920s American Art Deco) and the form of nearby Mount Pisgah and the surrounding ridges. The City Council Chamber inside was decorated with five murals by painter Clifford Addams depicting Native Americans and early white settlers of the region — work now covered with mountain landscape panels following criticism of their racial stereotyping.

When the county commissioners chose a more conservative courthouse, they did so partly out of expense and partly out of caution - Art Deco was new, modern, and unproven in a place that prided itself on respectability. The Buncombe County Courthouse, completed in 1928, rose seventeen stories in stripped-classical style, taller than City Hall, structurally separate, with no architectural conversation between the two. Critics ever since have lamented what Ellington's full plaza might have been. The city hall, by contrast, was a building local newspapers initially called the strangest in the South. Now it is the building visiting architects come to see.

Asheville City Hall was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1976 as a contributing structure to the Downtown Asheville Historic District. Ellington's building has appeared on city seals, business logos, postcards, brewing labels, and tourism brochures so often that for many people the pink-octagon silhouette is Asheville. The city hall still serves its original function - council meetings, mayor's office, municipal offices. Visitors are welcome in the chamber when the council is not in session, though the Addams murals have been covered since the city draped them with mountain landscape panels following community debate over their imagery.

Ellington left Asheville in 1932 when the Depression killed the boom that had brought him here. He continued practicing - notably designing buildings at Charleston Naval Yard and at Greenfield Village in Michigan - but never again had a stage like the one Asheville gave him in the 1920s. His three Asheville buildings remain in active use almost a century later. The city hall sits at the corner of Marjorie and Court Plaza, two blocks from the Asheville Art Museum, three blocks from the Vance Monument. On a clear afternoon, the salmon tile glows against the blue ridges visible to the south. Ellington designed the building for exactly that view.