Stadium - Pyramid - Tower - Dome - Skyscraper

These are some of the houses of cards I built after I recieved Stacking the Deck by Bryan Berg for Christmas one year. The basic principle is very easy. The whole house consists of units of 4 cards each supporting each other, called "cells". The only problem is if one cell collapses, many, many more will collapse also!

I actually got a chance to meet Bryan Berg when I was at the local county fair. He was there, building a huge card city for all to see. I talked with him about card stacking, and he recommended a certain brand of cards for stacking (which work very well). Eventually, we exchanged e-mails, and now I'm sending him pictures of all my houses which he'll soon put on his website.

Stadium

This is probably the hardest building in the book that I've tried. It really is easier than it looks (believe me!), but it still got its fair share of collapses and frustration. It is just four layers of cells where the layers get smaller and smaller. Each layer is semi-circular in shape, so once it is completed, cards can be layed vertically on the layers.

card stadium
card stadium
image:top view of card stadium
overhead view
front view of card stadium
front view

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Pyramid

This one is really simple, just a few square layers getting smaller. I had a lot of trouble with the second layer though, because it kept causing the first layer to collapse.

card stadium
card pyramid
front view of card pyramid
front view

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Tower

Another real simple house, made from....I think 15 layers of one cell each. On this one, each cell has a "fence" of cards around it. There's me next to it for a height comparison- I'm about 5'-1" in that picture.

Trev and tower

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Dome

This one was definitely pretty difficult. This was the one I tried to build when I first got the book. Bad idea by the way. Anyway, I tried to do it again, and succeeded pretty well. This one's got a few circular layers on top of each other, then has vertical cards to make the dome shape. It's similar to the stadium, but inside out.

side view of card dome
side view
card dome
card dome

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Skyscraper

I haven't build a house in a while, so I decided it was about time to make something big. I wanted to make a tower, but I figured I should start big and get smaller, unlike the other tower I made that was a uniform width all the way up. I like this one a lot, because it looks like an actual skyscraper, as opposed to a weird card tower. Click on the large picture on the right to get a high resolution photo, stitched together from two photos.

towertop towerbig
towerbottom

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