Stacks was originally created as a site-specific sculpture for the ground floor of the Old Yale Art Gallery, a 1928 building designed by Egerton Swartwout. The sculpture references the art library stacks that were housed in the building when Richard Serra studied at Yale in the 1960s. Its two rectangular steel blocks stand at three degrees from the vertical and are placed parallel to one another sixty feet apart. This sculpture once commanded the neo-Gothic building's large main hall. In anticipation of the Swartwout building's renovation, Serra re-sited Stacks in the sunken courtyard of the Kahn building in 2006. Serra's site-specific sculptures are predominantly known for the phenomenological experience their massive forms create, and Stacks invites the visitor to experience a field of space bound by steel and gravity.