Citations › Citation ID: 29

C29. BOOK: Daniel Konstanski, The Secret Life of LEGO Bricks: The Inside Story of a Design Icon (Unbound, 2022), p. 101.

Designers decided to use a technology the LEGO Group had newly acquired: vacuum forming. ... Trying to make the walls of any 3D shape as thin as possible meant that any open expanse on the top lacked support and bent easily when bricks were pushed down while building on it. Rising to this challenge ultimately led to the inclusion of sections near the middle, which dropped back down to ground level as a pit providing support to raised sections around their perimeter. Such pits would become part of every variant of 3D baseplate ever produced.

Raised baseplates were vacuum-formed from a flat sheet. The pit in the middle was added to make the areas with raised studs more rigid.