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| Bryan Berg is dwarfed by his playing-card models. Photo: Bryan Berg/Cardstacker.com |
The builder, Bryan Berg, used no glue, tape, or other tricks to make this mammoth, which was constructed in the African-American Museum in Dallas during the 2007 Texas State Fair. Only the facility’s ceiling kept it from being taller. Even though its silhouette resembled the Empire State Building or Sears Tower, neither was used as a guide. "The tower’s shape was derived for structural reasons entirely," Berg explained. "The construction of the upper levels involved a symmetrical reduction in cross-section, where only the central crossings of the shear walls were being built upon."
Berg has a bachelor’s degree in architecture from Iowa State University (ISU) and a master’s degree in design from Harvard Graduate School of Design. Before stacking cards as a fulltime profession, he served on the design faculty at ISU. Long before college, however, he was already building record-setting card structures, which helped him appreciate his engineering classes. "Building card buildings made structural engineering courses easier because it taught me how materials and structures behave," Berg said. "Being able to visualize structural behavior is the first step to creating a good structural solution. Card structures are elastic and settle or ’creep’ a great deal while being built, especially tall structures. Controlling these deformations is key when building shapes that aren’t symmetrical."
In addition to enjoying erecting his creations, Berg likes to demolish them. "I’ve learned more by knocking things down than I have by building them. Each project becomes a test subject during demolition. During construction, I develop opinions about how strong a building might be. But during demolition, I discover that they’re capable of much more stress than I expected," Said Berg, adding that during destruction of the Dallas tower, "nearly half of its cross-section was torn away before the tower became off-balance and finally collapsed."
Berg was introduced to card stacking by his grandfather at his family farm in Spirit Lake, Iowa, when he was eight. But it was during a high school snow day that Berg developed a technique for arranging cards in honeycomb lattices—rectangular grids. Rather than leaning cards against each other or utilizing triangular shapes, this let him build increasingly larger structures. "The weight is supported by the strategic arrangement of the cards in grid patterns that resemble waffles or ice cube trays. The cards actually prohibit each other from bending and falling over. If you can learn to build a grid structure, you can build about anything," he concluded. And in his book "Stacking the Deck," Berg reveals the card-stacking techniques that have won him acclaim.
How tall can playing cards be stacked? "I really don’t think there is a definable limit," Berg said. "Formal tests have been conducted on my grid technique of card building in a stress/strain machine at the structural engineering lab at Iowa State and showed that these structures are capable of peak loads of 660 pounds per square foot."
To date, Berg has stacked cards in major cities in the United States, Canada, China, Denmark, Germany, and Japan. He even constructed a card model of the Bird Nest Olympic Stadium for the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing, China. "This was especially complicated because the Bird Nest is an ellipse, tilting outward as it rises."
With plans "to be a cardstacker as long as I am able," Berg hinted that taking a regular job as an architect, engineer, or professor would require a significant paycut. So the next time you pull out a deck of cards, imagine how they might be used for more than poker.
