The real Lumon Industries: Eero Saarinen’s modernist building that inspired Severance

Those who have followed and loved Severance - the cult Apple TV+ series - know well the sense of detachment and alienation that permeates the spaces of Lumon Industries. Every hallway, every office, every rigid line of the company seems designed to reveal, almost ritualistically, the strategic function of architecture: instilling order and efficiency. What many don’t know, however, is that this cold, magnetic world actually exists, at least in its external form, in the heart of New Jersey. Bell Works, formerly known as the Bell Labs Holmdel Complex, is now a visitable building that still preserves, in glass and steel, the full visionary power of its history.

Designed in the 1950s by Finnish-American architect Eero Saarinen, the building was inaugurated in 1962 as AT&T’s research center. It was here that inventions that changed the world — from the transistor to the laser — were born, all within a context conceived to celebrate scientific collaboration and technological progress. In an era dominated by the rise of skyscrapers, Saarinen imagined a horizontal utopia of work, designing a modernist, minimalist complex with open structures to foster interaction among nearly 6,000 employees.

After years of abandonment, closures, and changes of ownership, in 2013 Bell Works was purchased by Inspired by Somerset Development, which transformed it into a “metroburb,” giving it a more inclusive rebirth suited to contemporary lifestyles. The new mixed-use masterplan now houses offices, restaurants, shops, residences, a public library, and spaces for events and art: a true urban ecosystem open seven days a week and animated by the local community.

Yet, while in reality the building has returned to being a place of gathering and vitality, on screen it takes on an entirely different meaning. In the series, director Ben Stiller and production designer Jeremy Hindle inverted its essence, using its architectural grandeur as a metaphor for oppression, dehumanization, and corporate control at Lumon Industries. What was born to inspire progress becomes, in front of the camera, an authoritarian instrument.

In Scission, architecture is not mere set design: it is itself a character, silent but omnipresent, observing, delimiting, and annihilating. Saarinen built Bell Labs to celebrate human collaboration; Stiller's series uses it to chronicle its loss. Today, walking the corridors of Bell Works also means walking through these dissociated worlds: the real one, which restores an icon of American modernism to the community, and the imaginary one, in which architecture becomes an instrument of psychological manipulation.

Opening image: Aerial view of Bell Labs Holmdel Complex, from Wikimedia Commons