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House of cards
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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Building a house of cards (also known as a card tower) is a pastime involving the stacking of playing cards on top of each other in order to form a structure. The structures created using this method rely on nothing more than balance, or the compression weight of other playing cards, in order to stay upright. No adhesives or other external connecting methods are used, and no damage or alterations are made to the cards themselves. The larger the structure therefore, the more likely it is to fall, due entirely to the higher number of balanced cards that could fail and compromise the integrity of the card building.
House of cards is also an expression for a structure or argument built on a shaky foundation, or one that will collapse totally if any one element is removed.
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One of the most familiar form of a house of cards involves the creation of a triangular
pyramid-style structure formed from a series of identical smaller structures that each emulate an inverted letter V.
1.) First, two cards are leaned against each other to form an A-frame, with the short ends resting upon a flat and stable surface:
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2.) Next, two more cards are placed in a similar fashion immediately adjacent to the existing structure:
/\ /\ / \/ \
3.) The space between the two structures is then horizontally bridged with an additional card to form a level platform:
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4.) On the developed platform, two more cards can be placed (as described in step 1) completing the pyramid:
/\ / \ ---- /\ /\ / \/ \
5.) This entire process can be repeated, each additional structure placed on the lowest level allowing for an increase in the overall height of the house of cards. The example above is two structures wide and two structures high, but with the addition of another eight cards it would become three structures wide and three structures high:
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/ \
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/\ /\
/ \/ \
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/\ /\ /\
/ \/ \/ \
- Main Article: Bryan Berg
A prominent house of cards builder is Bryan Berg. Berg broke the former world record in 1992 for "The Tallest House of Cards" with a tower that stood fourteen feet, six inches tall.
Another tower was built by Berg at the Department of Architecture at Iowa State University in 1998. It stood at approximately 25 feet tall and utilized over 1500 decks of standard playing cards that weighed over 250 pounds. It took two and a half weeks to build, with construction taking place in shifts that lasted anywhere from four to twelve hours each day. During construction, the tower was surrounded by scaffolding, which also formed the means of reaching the top of the tower to place additional cards.
On November 6, 1999, Berg built an even taller tower for the German edition of Guinness Prime Time [1] in the lobby of the casino at Potsdamer Platz, Berlin. This tower was nearly a foot taller than the one pictured from the above link. This time it stood at approximately 25.29 feet tall and utilized over 1700 decks to stack up to 131 stories high!
When he was asked whether it would be possible to build even taller (reaching for instance, about 100 feet), Berg just responded with a simple: "You bet!"
In 2004, Guinness added the "World's Largest House of Cards" as a new category in recognition of Berg's construction of a replica of Cinderella's Castle for Walt Disney World. [2] At the time of writing (August 2006), Berg was still the holder of both records.
