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.
Since Macau’s casino sector liberalised in 2002, a spate of Las Vegas style gaming giants have transformed the once sleepy former Portuguese colony into the world’s biggest gaming hub.
Weighing 272 kg and measuring 10 metres by 3 metres, the model which consisted of cards stacked without glue or tape, nearly collapsed several times.
"This has been the most ambitious project I have undertaken to date," Berg said. "It’s really like a real construction project because you have to engineer every single adjacency and every support that’s supporting everything above," he told Reuters.