Despite steel's well-established use in 20th-century sculpture, Richard Serra chose to work with this medium in part because he felt the ubiquitous metal art of the time was not using the material for its inherent qualities—qualities he understood because of his early jobs working at steel yards on the California coast while a college student. Of this he said, "[Steel] had not been used for its weight, its counterbalance, not for its cantilever nor its stasis nor gravitation load. It had not been used in the way that it had been in the Industrial Revolution in terms of building processes and procedures. Instead what they had done was to cut and fold it and use it as kind of a three-dimensional surrogate for painting."(1) Five Plate Pentagon is a sculpture comprised of five unpainted steel plates, assembled  in a manner resembling delicately balanced playing cards. There is both beauty and tension in this arrangement, as we are left to wonder how stable this house of steel cards may be.  While it can be tempting to look for a narrative inroad into the piece, the artist is not concerned with conveying any specific story or emotion. Instead, the work is about the formal properties of the unadorned steel, the lines in space that are carved out by the plates, and the viewer's reaction to the sculpture. Five Plate Pentagon weighs five tons and, in recent years, Serra has created work that is ten times as heavy.  His use of steel plates conveys sheer force, hard and unrelenting. Yet his sculptures still feel delicate because of the precarious balancing act he has achieved using this material. The sculpture can also elicit a sense of intimacy: at 60 inches high, the piece has a person-sized scale. 

(1) Richard Serra, in “I never thought there would be an audience for my work,” interview with Louisa Buck, The Art Newspaper 17, no. 196 (November 2008): 46–47.