Watching him stand on rickety yellow scaffolding 10 feet in the air with a look of total concentration on his face, you might wonder exactly why in the world Bryan Berg is building such a enormously tall house of cards.

For Berg, a 1997 architecture graduate of Iowa State, the answer to that question is simple.

“My goal is to re-capture the record,” Berg said.

The record he is referring to is the “Guinness Book of World Records” entry for tallest house of cards, an honor that was Berg’s until New Jersey man Don Waters broke his mark by one story earlier this year.

Berg is planning revenge, though. If the tower he currently is building turns out as planned, he’ll beat the old record of 112 stories by building a card house that is a mind-boggling 129 stories tall.

The house, which Berg hopes will be finished by late this week, is being built in the atrium of the College of Design building.

Berg said he wasn’t worried about working in the design building.

“It’s a really nice environment to work in,” he said. “Everyone here is really appreciative of these types of things.”

Despite his faith in his former schoolmates and professors, Berg still has someone “lurking around” the structure nearly 24 hours a day to protect against would-be vandals.

Not that knocking over the house would be easy. For a structure made from cheap playing cards, the house is relatively stable.

“You can go up and push on it and it won’t go anywhere,” he said. “Once you get that much mass together, it becomes pretty stable.”

Also, Berg is unconcerned about the house falling. He’s never built a house that fell.

That kind of card-stacking skill takes lots of practice. Berg began as a small child, learning the craft from his grandfather.

“It was my grandpa that really got me started,” he said. “He’s the family card shark, and he used to build houses after card games.”

Things started off simple, but Berg just kept getting more and more decks of cards and building bigger and bigger houses.

“At first I had five decks, then 20, then 300, then 600 and then 1,200,” he said. “And those were decks I’d never take out of the house.”

By the time he got to high school, Berg was already making a name for himself in the very specialized field of card stacking.

“When I was in high school, I was working for an engineer,” he said. “And he, along with my geometry instructor, got me lined up to break the record.”

The record at that time was a paltry 12 feet and 10 inches, held by John Sain of Indiana. In the first of his 11 subsequent attempts at breaking the record, Berg built an efficient tower of 14 feet and 6 inches. He used only 208 decks in the effort, as many as there are in the first 10 stories of his current house.

“That was the most amazing house I have ever built,” he said. “It was just daringly thin. In all of my later attempts, I have gone with stockier, more highly thought-out houses.”

The current attempt will be 25 feet tall when finished and will use around 1,300 decks of Bicycle Play-Mor cards, which Bicycle provides for free.

After he obtained the world record in card stacking, Berg said he started getting calls from all over the world from parties interested in having him create card structures for them.

“Being in Guinness is like being in the Yellow Pages,” he said. “Groups that for some reason want a house of cards built look in the book and assume that I’m the person to turn to.”

It is this assumption that has allowed Berg to parlay what was once a mere childhood passion into a profession.

“Yes, this is really my job,” he said.

Berg said he does mostly private work for marketing groups, trade shows and fairs. He bills by the day and works about 30 to 40 days a year. So far, he has done about 20 public structures.

“I make more money doing this than I could getting a job in architecture,” he said.

In fact, Berg recently hired an agent to help do some of his booking. However, Berg was quick to point out that he wouldn’t want to have to do too much card stacking.

“I probably couldn’t handle more than 100 days a year,” he said.

Berg cited the tiring nature of house building as the reason he could only do so many projects a year.

“I started doing this for fun, and it still is fun,” he said. “But it is very mentally draining work. It’s not really thought intensive because you can be anywhere you want to be when you’re working on a house. That’s probably part of the reason it is so draining.

“The hardest thing is perseverance. It’s really hard until you get to the point where you can see the light at the end of the tunnel and you start to gain some satisfaction from the work.”

Discussing what it feels like to build a house of cards, Okoboji native Berg compared the process to driving a car.

“It’s like if you got in a car and drove to Chicago,” he said. “You know where you’re going, you know about how long it will take to get there. You’re not really thinking about how many cars are going by or anything like that, you just kind of go. You kind of put yourself in to autopilot mode.”

Berg doesn’t work from a blueprint and has only rough estimates of how he plans to accomplish a project before going into it.

“I can adjust which parts of the tower need to be stretched out,” he said. “I just kind of work by instinct, I guess.”

The massive house that Berg built probably will be knocked down on Thursday or Friday. Berg suggests to anyone that they come to witness the spectacle.

“It’s really an incredible act of gravity,” he said.