The only cues he received ahead of planning the show was that there would be a dance scene and that the ceiling would need to light up. “It read just like an episode of The Office, and was budgeted for a show like The Office,” he explains. “The individual, emerging from concentration in laboratory or office, will come upon magnificent, uninterrupted views of the surrounding countryside and the winter-garden interior courts as he walks, in moments of relaxation, down these periphery main corridors,” Saarinen said.īut Hindle says the mid-century aesthetic wasn’t written into the script. AT&T leadership wanted its scientists to have “serendipitous” encounters - a buzzword that designers and CEOs still use - with one another, so Saarinen gave them wide hallways and employee lounges and generously sized balcony ledges with built-in ashtrays every few feet overlooking the atrium. Historians called it an “ Industrial Versailles.” Inside, you’re met with a six-story-tall glass atrium that once held 3,600 trees, shrubs, and plants. When the late-afternoon sun hits the building’s reflective facade, it glows golden. When I look at buildings like that, there’s pride in the corporation and pride in being part of it.” And it is beautiful. “People had dance shows, their own farmers’ markets - they had everything in that place. “They really did try to create this perfect working, living world,” he says. When Hindle talks about Bell Labs, he sounds almost rapturous. The real-estate developer Somerset and Alexander Gorlin Architects remade it into a mixed-use office and commercial space in 2013, rechristened as Bell Works. Its architecture and history - its engineers and scientists earned nine Nobel prizes - contributed to a listing on the National Register of Historic Places. more Saarinen's 1962 design for Bell Labs was meant to be an idealized office for innovation. Its architecture and history - its engineers and scientists e. Saarinen's 1962 design for Bell Labs was meant to be an idealized office for innovation. “They’re there to dominate you and make sure that you know the rules.” It was the perfect backdrop for a show about a workplace with near-total control over its employees. “I always felt a sense of power in these spaces,” says Jeremy Hindle, the show’s production designer. It wasn’t accidental, of course, because Bell Labs represents the height of an era when offices were designed as a sort of corporate utopia, at least in the eyes of the people who made them. It was an extraordinary technology incubator. The laser, the cell phone, the Big Bang theory: They all came from here. This iteration of Bell Labs was - in the words of the institution’s biographer, Jon Gertner - an idea factory, the place whose thousands of scientists and engineers discovered or created so much that makes the modern world what it is. Designed by Eero Saarinen and opened in 1962, it was a showpiece for the monopolistic, cash-rich corporation that dominated American communications for the telephone’s first century. It’s in Holmdel, New Jersey, and it was the home of Bell Laboratories, the research operations of AT&T. Lumon is imaginary, but the building is not. The building is dead center in an elliptical suburban office park where the roads leading up to it and the parking that surrounds it are arranged in perfect symmetry. ![]() It’s a posture of corporate professionalism that’s reflected in the architecture of Lumon: an enormous mid-century mirror-glass box with an atrium that looks like a modernist cathedral. Why are there baby goats running loose? Why are people 3-D printing hatchets and watering cans? (Surely there are more effective ways to make gardening tools!) What the hell do all those coded numbers sent to the Macro Data Refinement office actually mean? As enigmatic as their work is, one thing’s for certain: They’re expected to perform their duties happily, respect the chain of command, and treat procedure like gospel. The fictional corporation at the heart of Apple TV+’s Severance is a massive place - and massively opaque. No one who works at Lumon Industries knows exactly what the company does.
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