Bryan Berg
Bryan Berg is a professional "cardstacker" who builds houses of cards on a very large scale. He is currently 33 years of age.
Career
Berg first experimented with card houses at age 8 at his family's farm in Spirit Lake, Iowa. During a high school snow day he discovered a new technique, building using a honeycomb lattice rather than by leaning cards against each other, that allowed him to build large structures.[1]
Trained as an architect, Berg is possibly the only person in the world to make a full-time living stacking cards.[2] Berg earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in Architecture from Iowa State University in 1997, and served on the design faculty there for three years.[3] In 2004, Berg earned his Master of Design Studies from the Harvard Graduate School of Design.
Berg's growing fame, and records, lead to many further projects.[1] Touring regularly, Berg has stacked cards in virtually every major U.S. city and in Japan, Denmark, and Germany. Berg's clientele have included Walt Disney World, Star Wars, San Francisco Opera, Neopets/Wizards of the Coast, Fuji Television Japan, Post Cereal, Pinnacle Brands, Topps, Baseball Hall of Fame, DMG World Media, Procter and Gamble. Projects have also been produced with organizations such as Coca-Cola, Pepsi, American Airlines, Major League Baseball, National Hockey League. Berg's science museum projects for children have included San Francisco's Exploratorium and Zeum, Science Museum of Minnesota, and Science Center of Iowa. He also starred in a music video by The Bravery, playing a lonely man who builds a fantasy world out of cards.[1]
In 2006, Berg used an adhesive for the first time on one of his projects. The structure, a re-creation of the "Fabulous Las Vegas" sign was created for Loctite with the adhesive brand's Loctite Control Gel Super Glue. The sign was displayed during the 2006 World Series of Poker in Las Vegas.[4]
World Records
As of October, 2007 Berg says he has broken Guinness World Records seven or eight times.[1]
World's Tallest House of Cards
Berg first broke the world record for tallest house of cards in 1992 at the age of seventeen, with a tower 14 feet, 6 inches tall (4.67 meters).
He built another tower at the Department of Architecture at Iowa State University in 1998. It stood at approximately 25 feet (7.62 meters) tall and used over 1500 decks of standard cards weighing over 250 pounds (113.4 kilograms) of standard playing cards. It took two and a half weeks to build working in shifts from 4 to 12 hours each day. During construction, the tower was surrounded by scaffolding.
On November 6, 1999, Berg built an even taller tower for the German edition of Guinness Prime Time in the lobby of the casino at Potsdamer Platz, Berlin. That tower stood approximately 25.29 feet (7.7 meters) tall and required over 1700 decks to stack up to 131 storeys.
On October 14, 2007 Berg finished a month-long project to build a 25 foot 9 7/16 inch tall "skyscraper" at the African-American Museum at Fair Park in Dallas, Texas (home of the State Fair of Texas), breaking his earlier record.[1][2] For this record he used a newly-developed technique involving stacking cards vertically instead of horizontally, which reduced the number of cards needed by nearly half.[1]
When he was asked whether it is possible to build even taller (for instance, about 100 feet), he said simply, "You bet!"[citation needed]
World's Largest House of Cards
In 2004, Guinness created a new record category for "World's Largest House of Cards" to recognize a project Berg built for Walt Disney World, a replica of Cinderella's Castle for Walt Disney World. [3]
Media coverage
- Berg has appeared on CBS This Morning, Good Morning America, The Today Show, Ellen DeGeneres, Martha Stewart Unsifted, Guinness Prime Time, Ripley's Believe It Or Not, The Discovery Channel, CNN and various foreign TV shows.
- His work has been featured in nearly every major newspaper nationwide in addition to publications such as Wired, Reader's Digest, Men's Health, Games Magazine, Maxim, The National Enquirer, National Geographic For Kids, Time Magazine for Kids, and 321 Contact.
- He has co-authored a book with Tom O'Donnell entitled Stacking The Deck, detailing some of his techniques and structures.
- In 2007, the Showtime network asked Berg to build a replica of the Rhode Island State House to promote their drama Brotherhood, which is filmed completely in Rhode Island. The building process was documented, took three days to build and contained 22,000 cards.
Personal life
Berg was born in Iowa.[1] During childhood and early teenage years Berg was afraid of heights.[citation needed] Berg drinks coffee to remain alert when stacking cards.[citation needed] He now lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.[2] The brand of cards he uses, Pla-More, are valued for their non-glossy finish, which makes them less slippery than normal cards. However, they are only available in Iowa or from his online store, http://www.cardstacker.com/store.html .
See also
References
- ^ a b c d e f g Katie Menzer (October 16, 2007). "Card stacker hopes State Fair tower breaks his record". Dallas Morning News. Retrieved 2007-11-14.
- ^ a b c By Aaron Brodie (November 14, 2007). "House of cards? No, he stacks skyscrapers". CNN. Retrieved 2007-11-14.
- ^ a b "About Berg". Bryan Berg. Retrieved 2007-11-14.
- ^ Francisca Ortega (July 29, 2006). "Artist rebuilds Las Vegas sign with cards, dice and poker chips". Las Vegas Sun. Retrieved 2007-11-14.