house of cards

• (General American) IPA^(key): /ˈhaʊs.ʌvˌkɑɹdz/, [ˈhaʊs.ʌvˌkʰɑɹdz]

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house of cards (plural houses of cards)

1. A structure made by stacking playing cards in a pyramidal fashion.
2. (by extension, often attributive) Any structure with alternating vertical and horizontal layers.
   • 1958, Glyn Edmund Daniel, The Megalith Builders of Western Europe, page 18:

     The essentials of megalithic construction are either the single large slab or the large slab as walling stone with another large slab resting on two or more large walling stones as a capstone—a sort of house of cards architecture.

   • 1977, Lionel Casson, Joseph Jacobs Thorndike, Mysteries of the past, page 49:

     Dolmens impress only by their massiveness: their house-of-cards construction is the simplest possible […]

   • 2017, Markus Antonietti, Klaus Müllen, Chemical Synthesis and Applications of Graphene and Carbon Materials:

     Also, it has been proposed that lithium ions can be adsorbed on both sides of the graphene sheets that are aggregated disorderly into a “house of cards” architecture, leading to two layers of lithium for each graphene sheet […]

3. (figurative, idiomatic) A structure or argument built on a shaky foundation.