Thursday, March 11, 2010

  Largest house of cards - Bryan Berg sets world record

  MACAU, China -- Bryan Berg , an American architect, used 218,792 cards to create a replica of the Venetian Macau, which is on display in its namesake luxury hotel and casino and sets the new world record for the Largest house of cards . 

 Photo: The world's Largest house of cards weighs 272 kg and measures 10 metres by 3 metres.
  ( enlarge photo )

   Berg took 44 days and 4,051 decks of cards to complete his world's Largest house of cards inside the Venetian, which sits at the heart of Macau's Cotai Strip, the China-ruled city's version of Las Vegas' neon alley.

   Since Macau's casino sector liberalised in 2002, a spate of Las Vegas style gaming giants have transformed the once sleepy former Portuguese colony into the world's biggest gaming hub.

   Weighing 44 stone and measuring 33 feet by just under 10 feet, the world's Largest house of cards which consisted of cards stacked without glue or tape, nearly collapsed several times.

   No tape or glue can be used in card stacking and to prove that Mr Berg has complied with the rules he will publicly knock down his 10.5m-long (35ft) construction in ten days time.

    The cards used in the world record attempt, if laid end to end, would stretch more than 17km (10 miles) and weigh more than 227kg (500lb). No wonder he stepped away very carefully.

    'This has been the most ambitious project I have undertaken to date,' Berg said.

   'It's really like a real construction project because you have to engineer every single adjacency and every support that's supporting everything above,' he added.

    'I was inspired to stack cards by my card-playing grandfather; maybe I can inspire some visitors at The Venetian Macao to try their hand at building their own structures.

    'There couldn’t be a more fitting place to build the world’s largest house of cards than at the world’s largest resort hotel,” he added.

    Guinness World Records created a new record for the largest house of free-standing playing cards to recognise a replica of Cinderella’s castle that Bryan Berg made for Walt Disney World in 2004

    Mr Berg first broke the Guinness world record for the tallest house of cards in 1992 at the age of 17, with a 4.67m (14ft 6in) tower.

    His most recent tallest world record was a 7.62m (25ft ) tower built at the African-American Museum at Fair Park in Dallas, Texas, in 2007

   Subscribe to our RSS News feed to receive updates.