To bring to life the nefarious corporation at the center of the dystopian thriller “Severance,” the director of photography Jessica Lee Gagné needed to find the right location for a fictional headquarters.
As she scoured the internet for abandoned malls, she stumbled upon a blog with photos of a decaying, hollowed-out midcentury office building called Bell Labs. There was an eerie emptiness, even as its wraparound internal walkways, triangular skylights, magnificent sunken lobby and giant planters built into a vast atrium remained.
Ms. Gagné typed “Bell Labs” into Google Maps and zoomed into Holmdel, a rural town in central New Jersey. “When I saw the overhead of it, I was like, this can’t be true,” she said. “Is this a real place?”
Within days, she and Ben Stiller, the director and an executive producer of the serial for Apple TV+, went to New Jersey — they drove up the winding access road, passing a looming, three-legged white water tower shaped like a radio transistor. The building had been renovated since the photos were taken, but the developers had not dulled the impact of its corporate frigidity.
“There was a part of me that couldn’t believe how perfect it was,” Ms. Gagné said of seeing the mirrored building that she saw in the summer of 2019. “It was this mind-blowing moment.”
This would become Lumon Industries — it is as much a character on “Severance” as the employees, who’ve agreed to surgically sever their brains, cleaving their work selves from their home selves. The building is the breakout star of the breakout hit: Fans have turned Bell Labs, now a mixed-use complex known as Bell Works, into a tourist destination and a social media darling on Instagram and TikTok.
Decades before the building became an ode to the soul-sucking dread of corporate America, it was a creative powerhouse for Bell Telephone Laboratories, the research arm of AT&T, the telecommunications giant of the 20th century. It was nicknamed the “Black Box” because of its opaque, rectangular exterior, according to “The Idea Factory,” the 2012 book about the rise and influence of Bell Labs, “an intellectual utopia” of its time.
What Was Bell Labs?
The researchers who worked at Bell Labs made discoveries that would fuel the modern age. At its height, Bell Labs employed about 15,000 people, including 1,200 with Ph.D.s, spread out at various locations, many of them in New Jersey, where Bell Labs was headquartered. One of the company’s locations was on 460 acres of Holmdel farmland that the company purchased in 1929. The scientists and engineers there pioneered the technology for microwaves, touch-tone dialing, cellphones, and satellite and fiber-optic communication. Among the Nobel Prizes amassed in Holmdel was the 1978 award in physics for detecting the eerie space sounds that proved the Big Bang theory.
For decades, the scientists in Holmdel worked out of a modest, single-story clapboard building amid the farmland, and just minutes from Sandy Hook beach. In 1958, the company hired the Finnish-American architect Eero Saarinen to design a modern, and much larger facility for its growing work force. This would be among the final projects for Saarinen, the designer of the Gateway Arch in St. Louis and the T.W.A. building at Kennedy Airport. He died in 1961, a year before the building opened.
The first office building to use mirrored glass, the two-million-square-foot, six-story structure was designed to foster spontaneous, creative interactions among the 6,000 researchers who worked there. Saarinen imagined that workers would encounter one another on the floating walkways, or huddle on the lobby sofas. “From those conversations new ideas would come, so it was a very modern idea,” said Donald Albrecht, a curator who organized a Saarinen exhibition.
But the offices and labs were windowless, and the space did not deliver on its social aspirations. Jon Gertner described the building as “a monument to architectural presumption” in “The Idea Factory.”
“The catwalks reminded people of a prison,” said Barry Kort, a retired engineer who was hired in 1968 and worked there for 19 years. “But I had never been in a prison so it certainly didn’t bother me.”
Instead, Mr. Kort, who was single during those years, spent most of his waking hours at Bell Labs, working late into the nights and on the weekends. Sometimes, he’d duck into one of the workshops and solder items from home that needed repairs. “I practically lived there,” he said. He even used the building as his mailing address.
What Is It Now?
In 1982, the federal government settled its antitrust cases against AT&T, prompting the breakup of the company, and ending its monopolistic hold over the telecommunications industry. Within a few years the research at Bell Labs was in decline. By 2006, the Holmdel building, by then owned by Alcatel-Lucent, a French telecommunications company, was facing possible demolition. An international outcry from the science community saved it. In 2013 a new developer bought and renovated the Black Box, transforming the quarter-mile-long atrium into an indoor promenade lined with shops, a food court and a library. The upper floors have offices.
On a recent afternoon, people walked their dogs and pushed strollers through the atrium. Remote workers sat with laptops in the sunken conversation pit, on sofas and at bistro tables. Toddlers played on artificial turf and lounged on beanbags.
Standing in an indoor grove of potted fiddle leaf figs, Rick Ely, a Bell Works security guard, told a reporter that the periodic “Severance” shoots make for a welcome distraction. The crew brings in ice by the truckload, spraying the berm and trees with crushed ice, and laying snow blankets on the ground to create the eternal winter vibe of the show.
For Ms. Gagné, who directed a recent episode, Bell Labs feels like a metaphor for the show’s so-called “innies” and “outies” — the work selves and home selves. She said she sees the opaque glass facade “as a reflection of the characters.”
“Who they really are on the inside,” she said, “is a lot darker than who they are on the outside.”
