Video: World Record House of Playing Cards

American Bryan Berg Builds 35-Foot Tall Replica of Massive Casino Hotel in Macau, China, Using Some 220,000 Cards

(CBS)  A 34-year-old American has broken his own world record by building the largest free-standing house of playing cards ever recorded.

Bryan Berg set the new Guinness World Record Wednesday by building a giant replica of the Venetian Macau hotel and casino inside the resort in China's gambling hub.

The structure used a total of 218,792 playing cards and took 44 days to complete. Completed, it is 35 feet long, 10 feet tall, and weighs 600 pounds.

"I can't help it, I was trained as an architect and I have taken just enough structural engineering to be dangerous," said Berg, who has a master's degree from Harvard's Graduate School of Design. "When I'm in there working - figuring out how to build something - even though I'm sort of playing around with playing cards, it's really like a real construction project. Because you have to engineer every single adjacency and every support that's supporting everything above."

Berg had some close calls during construction - including several collapses.

The 1.2 million square-foot Venetian Macao Resort Hotel is the world's largest resort hotel.

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