As far back as 1931, Calder seized on the term to describe sculptures he made without his famous mobile forms. "Jean Arp said to me, 'Well, what were those things you made last year--stabiles?'" (J. Lipman, Calder's Universe, New York 1976, p. 305). And so they were christened, though it took twenty-five more years before Calder was able to make them on the scale that he originally envisioned them.

Robert Osborn, a social commentator, cartoonist and collector, was a close friend of Calder's. In an interview with Calder published in 1969 in Art in America Osborn described his feelings about his friend's stabiles:

At heart, Calder has always been an engineer. He has clothed his engineering with his joyful imagination and his lithe sense of beauty. But the well-spring of his art remains the thrusts, the tensions, the stress loads, the balances, the forces of gravity which the engineer proceeds to adjust and join... (ibid., pp. 306-307).

Five Points was selected by Calder and Osborn to stand outside Osborn's house near Calder's studio in Connecticut. It exemplifies all of the strongest tendencies of Calder's art--the fluid grace of the planes as they interact with each other; the lissome structure; the lightness of the piece's attachment to the ground. The planes of steel plate are not so much anchored as joined in a ballet-like embrace, ready to rise and float effortlessly across the landscape.