To make the compound of five cubes, begin with a dodecahedron, as seen above. Next, add segments as new edges, and let them be all of the diagonals of all the dodecahedron’s faces. Then, remove the pentagonal faces, as well as the original edges. What’s left is five cubes, in this arrangement.

Using polyhedral manipulation software called Stella 4d (available at www.software3d.com/Stella.php), these five cubes can be removed one at a time. The first removal has this result:

That left four cubes, so the next removal leaves three:

And then only two:

And, finally, only one remains:

Because their edges were pentagon-diagonals for the original dodecahedron, each of these cubes has an edge length equal to the Golden Ratio, (1 + √5)/2, times the edge length of that dodecahedron.