How This Guy Stacks Playing Cards Impossibly High

[Brian] The old saying is like a house of cards,

so that must mean fragile.

That must mean imminent collapse.

I know that a house of cards can be way more stable

than anyone thinks.

[Reporter] This Harvard-educated designer

draws on his background in architecture

to build unbelievable structures out of cards.

They can hold bricks,

withstand leaf blowers,

and some are dozens of stories tall.

I don't really think there's a limit to how tall

a house of cards can be.

The limit is your ceiling, and just having enough cards.

My name is Brian Berg, and I am a professional card stacker.

[Reporter] Berg's career in card stacking

started when he was eight years old.

He broke his first world record when he was in high school

in 1992.

Since then, he's broken several world records,

often beating his own previous record.

I know this will sound crazy,

but I actually don't even know how many times

I've done a Guinness project.

I know I've done the world's largest house of cards twice.

Tallest of house of cards in 12 hours once.

And then the tallest house of cards,

I want to say I've officially went after a record,

I think, I don't know, six, eight times at least.

[Reporter] And the one where he built

the tallest house of cards in 12 hours,

it was on top of a fully loaded washing machine

that was turned on and spinning

at 1000 revolutions per minute.

Guinness worked hand-in-hand with us

to create a new record category.

That was tallest house of cards in 12 hours,

with an asterisk,

on top of a loaded, spinning washing machine.

That's not part of the category,

but just had to make it even more impossible.

Of course, I was kind of terrified

that I would get a couple hours into it,

and it would start vibrating.

Anyway, it's just nuts sometimes what I have to do.

The thing I always liked about the cards

was it wasn't figured out.

You had to invent your way through it.

You had to make it work.

[Reporter] When Berg's not chasing world records,

clients pay him to build card structures

for events and commercials.

He's been stacking cards professionally since 1994,

but he started building when he was just a little kid.

Card playing has always been a big part

of my mom's side of the family.

While everyone was refilling drinks,

taking a bathroom break, my grandfather would often times

build a small house of cards with one deck,

and it would get two or three or maybe four stories tall.

It would collapse, and he'd curse,

and then the card playing would resume.

That was my real introduction to card stacking,

was my grandfather.

He did teach me a few things,

but I really don't use those techniques anymore.

Everything else that I do is a series of happy accidents

that I've discovered along the way.

I'll have a lot of people come up to me while I'm working,

and they'll say, You should've been an architect.

And I'm like, Well, you know, that's my real background.

[Reporter] Berg does have a degree in architecture

and a masters in design from Harvard,

but by the time he went to college,

he was already an expect card house builder,

a craft defined by trial and error.

And one of the most critical discoveries he made

was that the typical pyramid shape won't cut it.

All the engineers and architects out there

will tell you that the triangle is the strongest shape,

and it is, but it relies on ends being fixed together

or being forced to be together.

There's nothing forcing these anywhere

other than gravity to the ground like you just saw.

[Reporter] So Berg relies on squares

and right angles instead.

The primary technique is what I call the grid.

The grid is, you're setting the cards at right angles

at their mid points to create basically a bunch of boxes.

For me, card stacking, the more I figure out about it,

the more I'm able to do, and the more I'm able to do,

it just sets me up for the next discovery.

There's the grid, there's the column

that came out of the grid technique.

There's the wall that came out of the column technique.

I would say that the majority of things

that I come up with now are some sort of a tangent

of tangent of a tangent of something else

that I already knew how to do.

At every single project, I have a little observation

that makes me better.

Or I'll do something without even realizing it

and think, Oh, that worked.

Or, Oh, that looks cool.

and I just keep adding it to my repertoire.

[Reporter] Berg recreate the Beijing Olympic village

in cards in a Chinese mall in 2008.

[Brian] For that, I built the bird nest stadium,

which was another thing that I had no clue

how I was gonna even possibly do that,

but I'm like, Yeah, sure, I'll do that.

I got thousands of people standing there watching me,

including my client when I'm starting it.

It's not working, it's falling over,

and I'm standing there thinking, What am I gonna do?

But you know, that's the fun thing about it

is you just have invent your way out of the problem,

and keep moving.

[Reporter] Berg built the world's tallest card structure

in 2007.

It stood just a smidge over 26 feet tall,

and for this one, he tried something new.

He built with the cards standing vertically

instead of horizontally.

He had never used that method to go that tall.

[Brian] When I built what I would call the latest version

of the tallest house of cards,

that was a little bit intimidating

because it was probably three times taller

than I had ever used that technique before.

I just took a risk and went for it.

I really didn't know what would happen.

[Reporter] It required over 1000 decks of cards

and took about a month to build,

and it stood, and it was surprisingly strong.

1000 decks of cards

built into the world's tallest house of cards

is somewhere in the neighborhood of 140 pounds,

which means that no sneeze is gonna knock that over.

It's actually gonna take a pretty big force.

I was using a leaf blower to knock that house of cards down,

and the leaf blower started smoking and quit working

during the implosion, so I just threw the leaf blower down

and had to go after it with my hands.

Card house defeats leaf blower, go figure.

[Reporter] Berg sometimes uses three to four cards

instead of just one because adding weight to the structure

adds stability.

It's just a lot more stable than they think it is.

Is it fragile, yes.

But is it gonna just fall down

because you threw a penny at it?

Or because you walk past it?

Probably not.

And a lot of that is just

because of how many cards are involved.

Think about how heavy a stack of newspapers is

or a stack of magazines.

It's really heavy.

You forget about all of that mass,

and it's more of a brick house, less of a card house.

[Reporter] Berg used over 200,000 cards

to build the world's largest card structure

back in 2010.

In this case, it was basically a massive replica

of the Venetian casino in Macau.

It was 4000 decks, 45 days.

It was actually more than 45 days of work

because the last week of it, I really didn't sleep.

[Reporter] And when he finished,

he used a tried and true method to knock it all down,

a giant fan.

Berg has built a couple of things with glue

when clients have asked him to.

But aside from these exceptions,

Berg is a card stacking purist.

I don't tape or glue the cards, bend them or fold them

or modify them in any way.

I think the thing that surprises people

is that gluing is actually just insanely time intensive.

It takes 100 times longer than just letting gravity

line everything up for you.

[Reporter] When Berg was given 10 hours

to build whatever he wanted, he decided to try something

had had never built before.

For this rocket, when I got here,

I didn't exactly know how I was gonna do it.

I didn't exactly know how it would turn out,

but I had an idea, and I knew that as I started

working through it, that I'd figure out what I wanted to do.

[Reporter] He started by making sure

the conditions were right.

There's always some sort of climactic consideration.

Is there a subway outside, down three stories?

Another one is the humidity.

If it's too humid, the cards will take on

all this water vapor because they're made out of paper,

and they'll want to curl up.

Likewise, if it's too dry, they will do the same thing.

They'll start to change shape.

[Reporter] Berg leaned on his architectural background

to build the different elements of this rocket.

In this case, the main structural design

was a series of columns arranged around a hollowed center.

He designed as he went, listening to his instincts,

like he always does.

One big surprise on this project

was that I didn't finish covering the outside

of the rocket because I actually really liked

the lines chasing down it,

and so I just left it.

I could've built a central post in the middle,

and I could've built a sheer wall or two inside

to stabilize it, but I didn't for the sake of time.

And the cool thing about not doing any of those things

is that it created this totally hollow structure

that looks really cool without the skin on it.

So it's again happy accidents.

[Reporter] Here's the thing about Berg's craft,

he can't move the things he builds,

and they're usually in public spaces,

so almost everything he builds has to be destroyed

shortly after finishing.

A question I get a lot is, Aren't you heartbroken

when you destroy one of your works?

And it's like, Well, honestly, no

because people love it.

People are just drawn to destruction.

They like to see stuff collapse and fall.

It's never a good scene, I think,

but when it's a house of cards, it's just good, clean fun.

I know it can't stay up forever.

I can't take it home with me.

I might as well have a good time knocking it down,

and the other part of it is, I treat each implosion

as a little bit of a test.

The structural nerd in me really likes seeing

what it can take, and witnessing that.

I go forward knowing that the project

that I'm working on next

is just not gonna fall down randomly.

It helps me understand the limits.

I'm testing it.

I'm having a good time, I'm knocking it down

because I have to, and that almost, more than anything,

has given me guts.

[Reporter] And those guts that he developed

mean that he has no fear when stands on a ladder

and finishes these incredible architectural feats.

When I'm up there putting the last few cards on,

I'm not even remotely worried about it collapsing out

from underneath me because I just know from experience

that it's just not gonna happen.

My track record of success with cards

is just because it's the right mix

of using what you know and just the right amount of risk.

And you hope for the best.