Awesome Towers

There are obsessions, and then there’s this. Artist Robert Wechsler spent seven years making this sculpture entirely from pennies. He built the 540-pound tower of pennies by cutting four slots into 100,000 pennies, assembling them into strings, and then into sheets for stacking. He had to build a special rig to press the pennies together, a dozen at a time.

It took four days for a team of 18 builders to erect this massive wooden tower and under 45 seconds to knock it all down. The 82-foot-tall tower was designed and assembled from nearly 100,000 Kapla planks by KaplaBen and his build team, including domino queen Lily Hevesh.

Even the slightest breeze or unsteady hand will cause a house of cards to topple. Tian Rui remains undaunted. Using a stacked card technique, he built a 27-level tower in under an hour, setting a Guinness World Record. It’s nowhere near the tallest house of cards ever, which measured 25 feet tall, but Bryan Berg built that with no time limit.

Playing a regular game of Jenga gets pretty challenging after you’ve got a few dozen bricks in your tower. Tai Star Valianti managed to build an inverted pyramid out of a whopping 485 of the wood blocks, precariously balanced onto a single vertical block, and breaking his own Guinness World Record.