Using approximately 143,000 playing cards and no tape or glue, 15-year-old student Arnav Daga (India) has officially created the world’s largest playing card structure.
It is 12.21 m (40 ft) long, 3.47 m (11 ft 4 in) high and 5.08 m (16 ft 8 in) wide. Construction took 41 days.
The building features four iconic buildings from Arnav’s hometown of Kolkata: Writers’ Tower, Shaheed Minar, Salt Lake Stadium and St. Paul’s Cathedral.
The previous record was held by Brian Berg (USA), who reproduced three Macau hotels measuring 10.39 m (34 ft 1 in) long, 2.88 m (9 ft 5 in) high and 3.54 m (11 ft 7 in) wide.
Before starting construction, Arnav visited all four sites, carefully studying their architecture and calculating their dimensions.
He found the bigger challenge was finding suitable locations for his card architecture. He needed a tall, airtight space with a flat floor and looked at “almost 30” locations before settling on one.
Arnav drew the basic outlines of each building on the floor to make sure they were perfectly aligned before he started putting them together. His technique involves the use of a “grid” (four horizontal cards at right angles) and a “vertical cell” (four vertical cards inclined at right angles to each other).
Arnav said that despite careful planning of the construction work, he had to “improvise” when things went wrong, such as when part of St Paul’s Cathedral collapsed or the entire Shaheed Minar collapsed.
“It was disappointing that so many hours and days of work were wasted and I had to start all over again, but there was no turning back for me,” Arnav recalls.
“Sometimes you have to decide on the spot whether you need to change something or change your approach. Creating such a huge project is very new for me.”
During these six weeks, Arnav tried to balance academic performance and record breaking attempts, but he was determined to complete his card collection. “Both things are difficult to do, but I am determined to overcome them,” he said.
The moment I put on my headphones and started studying the structure, I entered another world. – Arnav
Arnav has been playing card games since he was eight years old. He started taking it more seriously during the 2020 COVID-19 lockdown as he found he had a lot of free time to practice his hobby.
Due to limited room space, he began creating smaller designs, some of which can be seen on his YouTube channel arnavinnovates.
The scope of his work gradually expanded, from knee-high structures to floor-to-ceiling replicas of the Empire State Building.
“Three years of hard work and practice in building small structures improved my skills and gave me the confidence to attempt the world record,” Arnav said.
Post time: Mar-29-2024