World's biggest house of cards

A new world record has been established for a building erected entirely from playing-cards. Reuters reports:

Crowds of baccarat-obsessed Chinese punters crammed inside the world's largest casino, the Venetian Macau, witnessed on Wednesday the mega-casino's latest claim to fame as the world's largest "house of cards."

Kneeling at a quiet spot not far from the cavernous gaming floors of the casino, Bryan Berg, an American architect placed the last of 218,792 playing cards onto his paper edifice -- a replica of the Venetian Macau -- to break his own Guinness World Record for the largest house of free-standing playing cards.




Berg, a Harvard-trained American architect, took 44 days and 4,051 decks of cards to complete his model inside the Venetian, which sits at the heart of Macau's Cotai Strip, the China-ruled city's version of Las Vegas' neon alley.

Weighing 272 kg and measuring 10 meters by 3 meters, the model which consisted of cards stacked without glue or tape, nearly collapsed several times.

There's more at the link, including more photographs. Here's a short video clip of the event.

Congratulations to Mr. Berg. I don't know that I'd have the patience to work at something like that for 44 days straight . . . and what I'd do to anyone who sneezed in the vicinity doesn't bear thinking about!

Peter