Featured Image Credit: Bell Works
While a trip to New York wouldn't be complete without a stop by the Friends apartment building, Succession's Waystar Royco HQ, or Carrie Bradshaw's apartment from Sex and the City, there's another iconic TV filming location that's flying under some people's radar.
The weird retrofuturistic of Apple TV+'s Severance makes it one of the most unique shows around, and if you're wondering where Mark Scout and the rest of the Severed Floor go every day, internet sleuths have tracked down the real-life Lumon building.
The 'Lumon building' being located in the Holmdel Township of New Jersey's Monmouth County wasn't much of a secret, with lead actor Adam Scott and executive producer Ben Stiller discussing what it's like filming at the old Bell Labs Holmdel Complex on the official Severance podcast.
Finishing construction in 1962 as the brainchild of Finnish-American modernist architect Eero Saarinen, the building was once dubbed "The Biggest Mirror Ever" by Architectural Forum, and even held host to the Nobel Prize-winning discovery of Steven Chu's laser cooling.
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The building went up for sale in 2006, and these days, it's operated by Somerset Development, which turned it into a mixed-use office for tech startups.
Speaking to Curbed magazine, developer Ralph Zucker explained how hordes of fans have descended on Bell Works since Severance first aired in 2022. Saying that it was always 'mobbed' on the weekend anyway, Zucker added: "I have heard that we have a lot more people coming in and taking pictures of themselves in the space. We have a whole team that works on social media, and they’re inundated."
With no official tour, you're confined to just walking around the lower floors of Bell Works, while the Severed Floor you see in the show is filmed on a special set that was constructed in the Bronx.
Zucker refused to comment on whether Bell Works is planning an official Severance tour, although the buzz on social media suggests it could be a lucrative venture.
Even though the whole presmise of Severance represents 'corporate soul sucking', Zucker isn't worried about Bell Works gaining that reputation: "Although Severance portrays the headquarters as this empty devoid-of-life space, in reality, we’re literally teeming with life... We glory in the juxtaposition of the two extremes of Lumon versus Bell Works.
"The subject of everybody today is how do you get your people back to work, and our solution is to make it an inspired place where you want to come as those lines of work and play are blurring."
Our love of the Lumon building was shared by director of photography Jessica Lee Gangé, who told the New York Times how she'd been looking at abandoned shopping malls but was blown away by Bell Works: “When I saw the overhead of it, I was like, this can’t be true. Is this a real place?"
Saying it's like a metaphor for the 'Innies' and 'Outies' of Severance, Gangé sees Bell Works' glass facade "as a reflection of the characters" and saying "who they really are on the inside is a lot darker than who they are on the outside."
How very Severance of her.
