How the Bell Labs Holmdel Complex Inspired ‘Severance’

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Dylan Thuras: Offices. Most of us have spent sometimes many, many, many hours inside of them. Maybe you work in one. Maybe you go to one to get your taxes done. Maybe you visit your doctor in a corporate office space. You know the type of place I’m talking about. It usually has sprawling corridors, overhead fluorescent lights, an office park. The corporate office space has become the epitome of a kind of middle-manager American malaise. After America won the Cold War, we were on top of the world. And what did victory look like? Cubicles, fluorescent overhead lighting, a stultifying bureaucracy.

One of the latest odes to the office is the Apple TV show Severance. In Severance, the aesthetics of their office space combines a kind of 1960s mainframe aesthetic with a 2020s Black Mirror vibe. The office itself, the Lumon Industries headquarters, it’s one of the biggest characters in the show. It is an office space worthy of Terry Gilliam. It is absurd and funny and terrifying all at once. A space made to control and confuse. Offices were not always seen this way. In fact, the Lumon Industries building is based on a very real place, a place that was once seen as a kind of corporate utopia. And not just seen that way, a place that was one of the most productive, important workplaces in all of American history.

So what happened? When did the office become synonymous with a kind of dystopia? I’m Dylan Thuras, and this is Atlas Obscura, a celebration of the world’s strange, incredible, and wondrous places. Today, I’m talking with journalist Diana Budds. She writes about design and how the systems, products, and buildings around us can tell us about our own history. So we’re going to take a tour of the real building behind Lumon Industries: Bell Labs in Holmdel, New Jersey. This was a huge, incredible incubator of ideas in the 1960s. And then we’re going to find out how this industrial Versailles, as it was once called, eventually crumbled. And we ask the question: Can a utopian office space ever even exist?

This is an edited transcript of the Atlas Obscura Podcast: a celebration of the world’s strange, incredible, and wondrous places. Find the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and all major podcast apps.

Aerial view of Bell Labs Holmdel Matt Bisanz / Wikimedia

Dylan: The basic premise of the TV show Severance is that some workers have gone through this process of severing, of severance, and they split their consciousness into a work brain and a home brain. Never shall the twain meet. What we see of the innie’s office life is all shot on a soundstage, the imagination of the writers and the set designers. But the exterior building and the grand, imposing atrium is the very real Bell Labs in Holmdel, New Jersey. So this is where we’re going to start our tour. Well, thanks for coming on the show, Diana. I’m excited to talk about this with you.

Diana Budds: Yeah, thank you for inviting me.

Dylan: Let’s start at the show Severance. We’re in the second season. It’s very popular. I’m a couple episodes behind, so no spoilers. Lumon Industries is like this major character in the show. You know the company is nefarious or highly mysterious, highly secretive, doesn’t seem great. The building itself, the space, even the exteriors, but certainly the interiors, they give off this kind of very ominous, sometimes absurdist, but definitely disquieting vibe. What is it about the design of Lumon that is so unnerving?

Diana: I think that with Lumon, the scale is just so immense. And when we first are introduced to the company, you’re getting this kind of aerial shot of the landscape and the building within this landscape. And so it’s set in this perfect elliptical site. It is this 2 million square foot building, like this is enormous. And then as you sort of wind through this very triumphant driveway to get to the front, you’re then going into essentially this mirrored box. And inside, it’s a six story tall atrium. And there’s something that’s almost cathedral-like about this place. I’m even thinking of the site in the landscape, and it sort of feels like these romantic paintings from the 19th century, where you have this beautiful scenery and this temple in the distance. And then we get there and go inside. And that is like the nave of a cathedral almost, where you are just very small in this massive, massive building. There’s a grid. It feels just very orderly, that you are sort of being maneuvered in a very specific way through the site and through the building. And as a viewer, you kind of get that sense of like, I am being controlled in some way. There aren’t really many places for you to go meander. There’s this sort of really monolithic cube, and you know, what’s going on inside? You see a black box, and its symbolism is already like, this is opaque.

Dylan: Yeah. All the exteriors and like the atrium shots and severance are totally out of human scale, right? You know, they represent kind of this corporate power. And then you have this kind of rabbit’s warren of confusing hallways and offices inside. And it’s all sort of, it’s so interchangeable that it’s like an impossible labyrinth to navigate. I mean, so much of the show is literally just running through hallways. You know, one of the interesting things is the Lumon Industries headquarters, it’s not just some set designer’s imagination, right? This is based on some very real pieces of architecture.

Diana: So, Lumon is set in a very real office building that was constructed in the late ’50s and early ’60s for Bell Labs. And this was sort of like a Lumon-esque company of its time. They were involved in communications, so telephones, but they were really interested in the infrastructure of how we communicate. They had figured out fiber optic infrastructure. They invented the transistor, which the research team ended up winning a Nobel Prize for. And Unix computer language also came out of Bell Labs. They really gave sort of free reign over their employees at the time. They could do a lot of these open-ended research projects where they’re like, you know, we don’t know what’s going to happen or what’s going to come out of it. And often they were quite ahead of their time with some of the concepts that they were interested in developing. A lot of secret projects, I think, that were going on there.

Dylan: It seems like this whole period of Bell in especially ’40s through ’60s, let’s say, there is this focus on the future in every possible way, right? They’re trying to invent totally new ways of doing very fundamental things. They’re inventing new entire fields of study, like information theory is this field that’s just like invented whole cloth in Bell Labs, and that this is influencing also their workspaces. What was the company’s reputation in this period, in the ’40s, ’50s period of kind of great innovation?

Diana: I think that they were sort of coming out of time where corporations were also just in their nascency. I think they had a monopoly at the time over telecommunications.

Dylan: They’re 100 percent downstream of the AT&T-Bell monopoly over telephones.

Diana: Yes. So I think the fact that they did have a monopoly also enabled them to be a little bit more luxurious with what they were dedicating their resources towards. But they were certainly between the ’40s and ’60s in an extreme growth period. And Bell Labs’ research division was in New York City, in a building on the West Side in what is now the Westbeth Artists Housing, and it was an old factory. And they were sort of at this point where they said, you know, we want to be creating the future. We want to be doing something that is different. We want to do something that’s exciting. We can’t be in this old space. We also need to attract the most talented engineers and scientists and researchers to come work for us. And so that’s why they relocated to Holmdel in New Jersey and created what is essentially like one of the first suburban office parks. And the fact that it is like this building on the green, you could easily see how, you know, that could be the university in the quad.

Dylan: Well, I hadn’t thought about that, but it feels more of a college campus kind of vibe, this sort of area of study set into nature as opposed to a factory or something like that.

Diana: Yes, exactly.

Dylan: Okay, so Bell Labs in Holmdel, I know there were a bunch of different labs kind of all over the place, but the one that Lumon is based on, that opened in 1962?

Diana: Yeah, that opened in 1962. And by the 1960s, there were 16,000 people that were working at Bell Labs. There was a huge sense of pride around working at Bell Labs. And I think that the way that the architect behind the project, Eero Saarinen, designed it to create a sense of community. And I think that when you look at the organization of the building itself, it has these long corridors that were designed so that people would have serendipitous encounters. That an engineer, as they’re walking to some other destination, might run into a computer scientist and then they could, you know, hatch their next great idea. The six-story atrium would have been filled with plants. At the end of each of the balconies, there were ashtrays that were built in so that folks could just go and have a smoke break and also talk with their colleagues. And it really was at the scale where you wouldn’t necessarily need to leave to do anything.

Dylan: Now it’s become a kind of, I don’t know, cliche of like Silicon Valley, this notion of chance encounters resulting in all of this. But this is like, Bell Labs is like one of the first places that’s actually kind of experimenting with some of these ideas, right?

Diana: And it’s interesting because if you look at the corridors in Severance, they are these almost infinite seeming corridors where you feel very hemmed in. It’s just white walls and white walls. And Bell Labs had similar hallways. There was more glass, you know, it wasn’t completely as enclosed. The scale of the building was such that you could look down certain corridors and the horizon would disappear. You wouldn’t necessarily be able to see the end of it.

Dylan: Right.

Diana: Architects often think that they are having a certain effect or a certain impact. And they think that, oh, this is such a great thing, like the symbolism of infinite knowledge that would be so wonderful, actually in practice can end up being quite domineering.

Dylan: I’m curious about, did this office space that Saarinen, you know, designed in Holmdel, did it achieve its goals? Did it actually create this kind of utopian workspace?

Diana: I don’t think it did create that utopian workplace. I think that for some of the things that I mentioned, in terms of the scale just being too large, that folks really did not find that they were getting these serendipitous encounters. I think folks found it very hard to navigate in that sense. And I feel like it’s interesting to also examine what is happening historically in the immediate post-war era. This is also the time where we’re completely changing technology. We’re completely inventing this idea of a corporation. The business has such tremendous growth. And then by the time you get to the 1960s, there are a lot of other cultural and political shifts that are taking place. There’s war, there are civil rights protests, a lot of instability around the world. The company is not immune to that. I feel like there’s always a downfall after you’ve built your monument. Like instead of an office, it’s a monument to this idea that they had. And I think what is interesting about these large-scale corporate complexes is that buildings and architecture are also symbolic. Part of the reason for building this space was to sort of augur the future that they wanted to see for their company. And I think that, for me at least, being more interesting is not necessarily the function of it, but the ambition that the building represented. And perhaps it is also a cautionary tale.

Dylan: It’s hard to imagine today that the office park could be seen as a picture of utopia, like as a picture of futuristic innovation. Why did offices become such deep symbols of dystopia? There’s very few utopian office ideas out there anymore. They’re almost always sort of comedies of the absurd, the dystopian visions, whether it’s a joke in the office or truly dystopian, like in Severance.

Diana:I think it’s the way that work has changed so much in the years since. I think that, you know, you’re sort of like a cog in the machine.

Dylan: I think the 2010s—let’s call it 2008 to sort of the start of the Obama era—there was this moment in tech. We forget about it now. We memory hole it. But there was a utopian vision of what technology and the internet was going to do for society and the world. Like there was a sort of optimistic sense. And it was also the time when Google and Facebook were, I think, operating in a Bell Labs-like capacity, more maybe than they are now. I think there are these moments of work and workplace optimism. I don’t think we’re in one right now.

Diana: I mean, I think if you were going to talk to the designers who are making the spaces for the Amazons, the Googles, the Apples, they are very much using that same language that was sort of happening around Bell Labs. Helping folks feel a little bit more engaged, helping them feel more productive, like architecture for sure does make us feel that way. But for the most part, most of us are not going to work in those elite spaces. But the designers are certainly trying to build better offices.

Dylan: Do you think we will ever have utopian-esque office spaces again? And what would that even look like in the modern era?

Diana: I mean, I think with utopia, there’s sort of like the catch in the phrase, which is it’s a place that doesn’t really exist. And so there is always this journey that’s working towards something better. However, I do think that there is an interest, particularly in some of these elite offices, where they are learning like, what do people actually need in order to do their best work? And there was this sort of moment with the open office where they’re like, yes, everyone will collaborate. You can easily see what other teams are doing, you’ll have more cohesiveness. And then everyone’s like, no, no, no, I’m just really annoyed with the sound, the temperature isn’t right. And there is this growing body of research that’s called neuroaesthetics. And it is really thinking about what’s happening inside the human body. And designers are now starting to integrate some of this approach into their work. So I don’t know, I think that takes massive investment. And as we’re seeing, again, fewer and fewer people are able to have access to those types of spaces because of the amount of money that is involved. The way things are going, I don’t think most of us are going to be in nicer spaces anytime soon, not to be so pessimistic.

Dylan: What happened to this beautiful, domineering, mid-century building in Holmdel? What happens, you know, when the corporation moves on?

Diana: So by the ’70s or the ’80s, Bell is not doing so well business-wise. There aren’t as many people that are working there. They eventually sell the complex, and then it is basically vacant. And that’s a similar story to a lot of these corporate campuses. So that is a problem with these buildings. But what has happened recently is that they are being renovated to serve different uses. So I think it’s a startup incubator. I feel like there might be retail and restaurants that are there. They are still trying to create a really wonderful place to be. You can go there today if you want.

Dylan: I really want to go. I’ve never been. And I really want to go there.

Diana: Same. I actually haven’t been. And it’s called Bell Works. And what’s sort of funny is that I definitely got like a press release about Bell Works and the fact that it’s this thriving space. And it’s this place of community and connection. Not like anything in the Apple TV show Severance. But even the fact that they’re saying, oh, it’s about community and connection, I mean, that is very Saarinen-esque in the way that they’re talking about it. And I find that to be very inspiring, and perhaps a continuation of that utopian feeling of what these buildings can do. They’re not completely wasted.

Dylan: Yeah. I am so happy, though, that that building is still around, because I think I’d much rather have this mixed-use kind of incubator space. Whatever it was like to work there, and whatever slightly dystopian sense people get from it, certainly in Severance, it’s like a kind of a one-of-a-kind thing. And so I got to go. I really, really want to go.

How the Bell Labs Holmdel Complex Inspired ‘Severance’

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