Cinematographer Jessica Lee Gagné had to locate the ideal setting for a fictional corporate headquarters in order to bring the dystopian thriller Severance to life.
She came onto a blog with pictures of Bell Labs, a dilapidated, hollowed-out mid-century office structure, while looking for abandoned malls online. Even with its subterranean grand lobby, triangular skylights, wrapped entranceways, and enormous planters inside the large atrium, the space had a startling sense of emptiness.
Gagné’s curiosity prompted him to search for “Bell Labs” on Google Maps and focus in on the small town of Holmdel in central New Jersey. “When I saw the overhead view, I thought, ‘This can’t be real,'” she stated. “Is this an actual place?”
Within days, she and Severance director and executive producer Ben Stiller came to New Jersey. As they neared, they passed a winding access road and a three-legged white water tower styled like a transistor radio. The corporate austerity of the building was still there, despite renovations since the photographs were taken.
When Gagné first saw the mirrored building in the summer of 2019, she said, “A part of me just couldn’t believe how perfect it was.” “It was a profound moment.”
As much as the workers themselves—who have surgery to separate their memories of their jobs from their personal lives—this edifice would become into Lumon Industries, a character in Severance. The structure became the show’s main feature, transforming Bell Labs—now a mixed-use development called Bell Works—into a popular tourist destination and a TikTok and Instagram viral sensation.
Bell Labs: What Was It? Was it Bell Labs?
Bell Labs was a center of scientific innovation decades before it became a representation of corporate terror. It was the research division of the 20th-century telecom behemoth AT&T. The building’s bleak, rectangular façade earned it the moniker “The Black Box,” but it was previously regarded as an intellectual utopia, according to the 2012 book The Idea Factory.
At its height, Bell Labs, which had its headquarters in New Jersey, employed 15,000 workers across several locations, including 1,200 PhDs. In 1929, it acquired 460 acres of farmland in Holmdel as one of its locations. There, engineers and scientists invented satellite and fiber-optic communications, cell phones, touch-tone dialing, microwaves, and other technologies.
The discovery of cosmic background radiation in 1978, which was awarded a Nobel Prize, was a crucial piece of evidence supporting the Big Bang Theory.
For many years, Holmdel’s scientists operated out of a small, one-story clapboard structure that was only a short distance from the Sandy Hook coastline. However, when the staff expanded, AT&T hired Finnish-American architect Eero Saarinen in 1958 to create a more expansive, cutting-edge structure.
Known for both the TWA Flight Center at JFK Airport and the Gateway Arch in St. Louis, Saarinen envisioned a structure that encouraged unplanned connections among its 6,000 scholars.
Designed to foster innovation, the two-million-square-foot, six-story building was the first office building to use mirrored glass. Researchers would meet in lounge areas or on floating walkways.
But the vision and reality weren’t quite the same. There were no windows in the offices or labs, and the large area felt lonely. Jon Gertner, the author of The Idea Factory, described the structure as a “monument to architectural assumption.”
The pathways even reminded some employees of a prison. “The catwalks reminded people of jail,” reported Barry Court, a 1968-hired engineer. “But I’d never been to jail, so it didn’t bother me.”
Court, who was unmarried at the time, worked weekends and late nights at Bell Labs, effectively living there. He occasionally brought devices home to fix. “I spent most of my waking hours there,” he claimed, even addressing his correspondence to the building.
What’s It Right Now?
The U.S. government ended AT&T’s monopoly in the telecom industry in 1982 by dismantling the company. Bell Labs’ research dwindled within a few years. The Holmdel plant, which was owned by the French telecom corporation Alcatel-Lucent at the time, was in danger of being demolished by 2006. It was saved by a worldwide scientific protest.
The “Black Box” was acquired by a developer in 2013 and transformed into a contemporary indoor promenade featuring stores, a food court, and a library. The higher stories were converted into offices.
Parents carried strollers, people walked their dogs, while remote workers tapped away on laptops in lounge chairs, bistro tables, and conversation pits on a recent day. Kids tumbled over beanbags while playing on artificial turf.
Rick Ely, a security guard at Bell Works, stated that the occasional Severance shoot served as a pleasant diversion. To reproduce the show’s constant winter, the crew covered the ground, dusted powder on trees, and hauled in trucks of fake snow.
For Gagné, Bell Labs represented the “innies” and “outies” who are the show’s characters, whose personal and professional lives continue to exist in distinct realms.
“I think the characters are reflected in the mirrored glass façade,” she remarked.
“They are much darker on the inside than they appear on the outside.”
Bell Labs was the ideal representation of Lumon Industries in Severance because of its creepy, dual-natured presence—a sleek corporate façade hiding something profoundly unpleasant. The antiseptic hallways, harsh lighting, and oppressive symmetry of the show’s cinematic design melded in perfectly with the actual architecture of the structure.
In Severance, mirrored glass—once a representation of Bell Labs’ inventiveness and transparency—is used as a metaphor for seclusion and concealment. A terrifying representation of their shattered consciousness, Lumon’s employees live in a world where the outside world can look in but they are unable to see out.
Bell Works has prospered as a real-world location despite its sinister fictional persona, drawing tech firms, entrepreneurs, and creatives who appreciate its retro-futuristic architecture. Though its cinematic background as a dystopian corporate jail still remains in the minds of Severance fans, events, art exhibits, and community gatherings have transformed it into a modern hotspot.
Due to the popularity of the show, tourists keep coming to Bell Works to take pictures and films of its eye-catching atrium and hallways, hoping to get a glimpse into Lumon’s world.
