house of cards

Definitions

1. A structure made by stacking playing cards in a pyramidal fashion.
2. Any structure with alternating vertical and horizontal layers.
   attributive, broadly, often
3. A structure or argument built on a shaky foundation.
   figuratively, idiomatic

Equivalents

Examples

“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.”

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

“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 […]”

CEFR level