Bryan Berg
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Bryan Berg is a prominent builder of houses of cards on a very large scale.
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[edit] Career
Berg broke the Guinness World Record for the World's Tallest House of Playing Cards in 1992 at the age of seventeen, with a tower fourteen feet, six inches tall. His latest record-holding structure in the category is over twenty-five feet tall. In 2004, Guinness created a new record category for the World's Largest House of Cards to recognize a project Berg built for Walt Disney World--a replica of Cinderella's Castle. He continues to hold both records.
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.
In 2004, Berg earned his Master of Design Studies from the Harvard Graduate School of Design. He previously served as design faculty for three years in the Department of Architecture at Iowa State University, where he received his Professional Degree in Architecture in 1997.
[edit] World Records
[edit] World's Tallest House of Cards
Bryan broke the former world record in 1992 for "The Tallest House of Cards" with a tower fourteen feet, six inches tall.
He buildt another tower was built at the Department of Architecture at Iowa State University in 1998. It stood at approximately 25 feet tall and used over 1500 decks weighing over 250 pounds of standard playing cards. It took two and a half weeks to build working anywhere from 4 to 12 hours each day. During construction, the tower was surrounded by scaffolding, which is how he is able to stack cards at heights well above his own.
On November 6, 1999, Bryan 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 tall and required over 1700 decks to stack up to 131 storeys!
When he was asked whether it is possible to build even taller (for instance, about 100 feet), he said simply, "You bet!"[citations needed]
[edit] World's Largest House of Cards
In 2004, Guinness also made the "World's Largest House of Cards" as new category in recognition of his construction of a replica of Cinderella's Castle for Walt Disney World. [1]
[edit] 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.
[edit] Trivia
- Bryan Berg drinks coffee so that he could regain his alertness when it comes to stacking cards on a huge scale that requires him to have great concentration, cautiousness, and the substantial amount of time taken to complete it.[citations needed]
- When he was in his childhood and early teenage years, Bryan Berg was afraid of heights.[citations needed]
- In 2006, Bryan 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.[citations needed]
