- [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.