“Come with us to get severed at lumon,” reads the caption on one enthusiastic TikTok video. “I’m soooo obsessed #severance #lumon #bellworks.” The poster, Sophia Stern, had just filmed at an office park with an illustrious past: Bell Works, the former Bell Laboratories research center in Holmdel, New Jersey, designed by the midcentury master architect Eero Saarinen. It’s the place where cellular-telephone communications were essentially born and a lot of laser and fiber-optic technology was developed, among many others. On Apple TV+, however, it stands in for the headquarters of the fictional Lumon Industries, the disturbing company at the center of Severance, Apple TV+’s corporate-dystopia hit.
@sophiasternnn i’m soooo obsessed #severance #lumon #bellworks #nj #jersey
♬ Main Titles - Theodore Shapiro
Stern is hardly alone. In addition to the trickle of architecture buffs it always drew, Bell Works has been thronged lately by hundreds of Severance tourists, many of whom are there to post about it online.
This is not the first time Bell Works has been a set piece. A couple of movies, including 2023’s Jules, and quite a few TV series, including American Horror Story and Emergence, have filmed there. But nothing has put the building at its center quite like Severance, which is inherently a show about the corporate-office experience. (For the uninitiated: Lumon, the company in the show, installs implants in employees’ brains; their work and job lives are cleaved in two, giving them “innie” and “outie” personae. The outie has no memories of what goes on inside the building, and the reverse is true for the innie.)
Ralph Zucker, the developer who remade the defunct lab complex into its current multiuse self a decade ago, says it was already a destination before Severance aired. “You come there even on a Saturday or a Sunday when the offices are mostly closed, the place is mobbed — thousands of people, I’m not exaggerating.” But, he adds, with the success of Severance, “I have heard that we have a lot more people coming in and taking pictures of themselves in the space. We have a whole team that works on social media, and they’re inundated.” There’s no official tour, so visitors are confined to wandering the lower-level public spaces, including the massive central atrium ringed with walkways. The upper levels are not publicly accessible, or, as one visitor put it, “They don’t let cameras onto the severed floor.” When I asked Zucker if there were plans to offer a formal tour, he declined to say.
It’s not hard to see why Severance’s producers chose Bell Works to represent Lumon. The main building is a triumph of pure geometry, and, especially from a distance, it can be a little forbidding. One scientist who worked there back in the Bell Labs days described approaching it thus: “It was still a half-mile distant as one entered the property and started down the long esplanade road. Size and space conspired to create a strange optical illusion, in which the road turned out to be much longer, and the building much larger, than one at first perceived.” The central building is a perfect sharp-edged prism of charcoal glass, surrounded by a precisely drawn elliptical drive and a big lawn. One can see out but not in. Particularly as it has been dressed and digitally tweaked for Severance, it looks icy. In real life, the wood-and-bronze detailing and pops of color in the décor warm it up quite a bit. A cheery multitoned yellow rug in the atrium, designed in the manner of Josef Albers, was swapped out for the show and replaced with Lumon’s signature green. Renamed Bell Works after it was sold in 2013 and renovated by the architect Alexander Gorlin, the old complex now incorporates shopping, eating, and performance and co-working spaces as well as more conventional offices. The lower floors, where the shops and food are, are open to the public. A representative of Inspired by Somerset Development, Zucker’s company, says it’s 98 percent rented, suggesting that it’s not going down in the office apocalypse.
Zucker is, I think correctly, unconcerned when I ask about letting the building become a synecdoche for corporate soul sucking. “We always understood that people would realize that this was not, you know, real life,” he says. “Although Severance portrays the headquarters as this empty devoid-of-life space, in reality, we’re literally teeming with life.” He notes that when the atrium was set-dressed to become Lumon, it reminded him of the gloomy disused building as his company had first acquired it. Whereas now, “We glory in the juxtaposition of the two extremes of Lumon versus Bell Works. The subject of everybody today is how do you get your people back to work, and our solution is to make it an inspired place where you want to come as those lines of work and play are blurring.” His only real concern, he adds, was accommodating the minor disruptions of shooting: retailers who had to close down for a day or two to make way for a film crew, say, or employees temporarily routed through a back entrance.
The place’s dual nature — its existence on the border between utopia and dystopia — has always been a part of the aesthetics. It was opened in 1962 as a product of its very particular time and place. The original AT&T, a.k.a. the Bell System, had an effective, highly profitable monopoly on the American telephone business and was often talked about as a monolithic, faceless entity. Because it was so wealthy, the company could plow money into basic scientific research and hope that some great moneymaking leap came of it. Bell Laboratories was that research arm, and earlier, it had been headquartered on the West Side of Manhattan (in what’s now Westbeth) and then in Murray Hill, New Jersey. The Holmdel building was the next step, a gleaming, impeccable prism meant to contain thousands of scientists in splendid quiet isolation. Saarinen put the labs around the perimeter, giving almost everyone beautiful views of the surrounding treescape, and ran long hallways around an interior atrium, theorizing that they would foster consistent chance encounters that led to cross-pollinated thinking. The railings had ashtrays built in every 20 feet, out of an idea that walking and talking and smoking were good for idea formation.
As it turned out, the building was a little too perfect and clean for that. The quote I cited above about approaching the building comes to us via Jon Gertner, whose excellent book The Idea Factory tells the story of Bell Labs. He says that, from day one, some scientists who worked there found its clean formality deadening compared with its more gemütlich predecessors — both the Murray Hill complex and a shabby wooden lab on the Holmdel site that had been razed for Saarinen’s building. In his interviews with the scientists, he says, “I could discern a certain love and affection for the Murray Hill lab and very mixed feelings about the Holmdel lab — the chilly modernism of it. It was an architect’s dream, and I’m not so sure it was a scientist’s dream.” But, he’s quick to add, some surely liked it better than others, and its vision, at least, was meant to be limitless, even if the world had limits in mind: “This was a monument that was built for an expanding company that was inventing the future. And I guess when it was being planned and designed in the late ’50s, you know, you could look at it and say that Bell Labs’ reign was gonna go on and on — you could kind of see into the future and that this would be its epicenter.” That began to fade with AT&T’s antitrust breakup in 1984 and, more generally, in a broad shift since then among American corporations away from basic research toward more targeted product development. “Not only did they have a lot of money, they had a kind of confidence that they could work on projects or technologies for decades without having to justify them into a quarterly five-year report,” Gertner says. “And when they were gone, you know, there really aren’t any companies now that could do that — I mean, Google was trying for a while with Google X, but who’s gonna take a risk on basic science?” Lumon wouldn’t, or at least wouldn’t tell you if it did.