Around Northern New Mexico

The first four cards are the toughest.

It?s pretty hard to argue with that assessment when it?s coming from the mouth of the guy who holds the Guinness world record for both the tallest and the largest house of cards. And Bryan Berg, a Santa Fe resident, won those records by stacking card upon card, over and over and over again.

For days. For weeks.

In comparison, the task for children and adults scattered over a practice room floor at Moving People Dance Studio last week was much simpler. Just build a grid. Maybe a second story, with the dividing cards placed diagonally to the grid. One group got to a third level before the cards came tumbling down.

Cries of ?All right!? and ?I did it!? were heard as Berg moved from group to group, offering mini-tutorials in playing-card construction techniques. He commiserated with the kids, telling them that the slick, buffed dance floor made their task a little more challenging.

The hourlong event was designed to draw attention to a new kit Berg designed, which already is being carried by Barnes & Noble, with negotiations under way to get it on some other store shelves. It?s also available on his website, www.cardstacker.com, for $25.

It includes flat forms with grooves to hold the cards to get you started on that first, four-card base, along with 825 cards ? made to specifications of the best weight and texture for stacking ? and an instruction booklet.

If you use every single card, you can build a version of the Empire State Building, he told them.

Berg makes it look easy. As people trickled in before the event started, he was stacking cards into a thin tower that grew to about shoulder height before he let it topple.

Hayden Colfax, 11, didn?t have quite the same success with her floor-level attempts.

?It?s kind of hard, because the cards fall all the time,? she said, taking a break from the card construction with her siblings. ?You kind of get frustrated.?

But Benito Vega, 13, who said he hadn?t tried building things out of cards before, pronounced the activity ?cool.?

Kids weren?t the only ones trying their luck. Plenty of adults were testing their skill at this very different approach to cards.

?It?s a good exercise in patience,? said Will Channing, who came with his family, Angelita Ferro and 12-year-old son Sage, who was mostly watching his dad stack the cards.

Although trained in architecture, Berg makes his living as a cardstacker, constructing buildings for clients around the world, such as furnishings for a life-size hotel room (including a toilet and lights) for Holiday Inn and a Cinderella?s castle out of park passes for Disney. He spent two weeks cardstacking for ?Good Morning America? to draw attention to tsunami relief, he said.

A native of Iowa, where he first learned cardstacking from his grandfather when he was 8 years old, Berg has lived in Santa Fe since 2004. Yet, he noted, he hasn?t built a project yet that is specific to or publicly seen in the City Different. Most of his work is done on-site for paying clients and often kept under wraps until an official unveiling by those clients.

Often, his decision on what jobs to take on has to do with new challenges. ?I will do it if it?s something that?s not been done with cards before,? Berg said.

Source: http://www.abqjournal.com/main/2012/12/18/north/around-northern-new-mexico-292.html

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