Bryan Berg

Bryan Berg (born March 21, 1974) is a professional "cardstacker" who builds large-scale houses of cards.

Trained as an architect, Bryan Berg is the only known person to make a living building structures with freestanding playing cards. He uses no tape, glue, or tricks, and his method has been tested to support 660 lbs. per square foot.

Berg earned a Professional Degree in architecture from Iowa State University in 1997, and served on the design faculty there for three years. In 2004, Berg earned his Master of Design Studies from the Harvard Graduate School of Design.

Berg has stacked cards for corporate special events, public relations campaigns, and science and children's museums in many U.S. cities, Canada, Europe, and Asia. Berg's clients have included Walt Disney World, Lexus, Procter & Gamble, Major League Baseball, the NHL, and the San Francisco Opera. He also participated in a music video by The Bravery, playing a lonely man who builds a fantasy world out of cards.

Berg first broke the world record for the world's tallest house of freestanding playing cards in 1992 at the age of seventeen, with a tower fourteen and a half feet (4.67 meters) tall. Since then, Berg has been commissioned to break his own Guinness Record approximately ten times.

He built another tower in the College of Design's atrium 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). It took two and a half weeks to build working in shifts from four to twelve hours each day. During construction, the tower was surrounded by scaffolding. On November 6, 1999, Berg built a taller tower for the German edition of Guinness Prime Time in the lobby of the casino at Potsdamer Platz, Berlin. That tower was approximately 25.29 feet (7.7 meters) tall and required over 1700 decks to stack up to 131 stories.

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