These structures take hundreds of hours and to build and seconds to destroy, but despite the painstaking patience and creativity required, Ahmed Hassan Refaie is a pro at it.
He is an Egyptian law student who spends all his spare time building houses palaces and churches out of nothing but poker cards, some of which take days to form something substantial.
Ahmed hopes he can open a museum to put his fragile constructions on display.
“I love this, to be honest. I like the idea a lot. I like architectural shapes. I like cards. I like art. So, I tried to find a link between them and this is the link,” he said.
The 23-year-old artist has been pursuing the hobby for over a decade and hopes he can bag a Guinness World Record or another accolade that can help him build his museum.
“The biggest model I made was the ‘Church of Losanda’, this was made for the child who died in the bombing. It took me 100 hours, because of the details. The small things that were in it were very hard to get right. So, it took me a very long time to do the details,” Refaie said.
His magnum opus is the “Church of Losanda,” which was named after a bomb blast victim of a recent terrorist attack targeting Christians in Egypt. The masterpiece took him 100 hours to build.
“I would like to get a Guinness Record. Some people say Guinness is my goal but to me it isn’t. To me a Guinness is a step which would enable me to put on a big exhibition. Hopefully, in my 10-year plan, I’d like to build a museum made of cards. I got the idea from a museum in China that is made of cardboard,” he” added.
Watch the magician wield his spell in the video below:
