To bring the evil company to life at the center of the dystopian thriller “Severance” , photography director Jessica Lee Gagné needs to find the right place to find the fictional headquarters.
While she was searching the internet for abandoned shopping malls, she stumbled upon a blog with a picture of a rotten, hollowed-out medieval office building Bell Labs. Despite its interior sidewalks, triangular skylights, grand sunken halls and huge flower pots, there is also a creepy emptiness.
Ms. Gagné typed “Bell Labs” into Google Maps and zoomed in to the small rural town of Holmdel in central New Jersey. “When I see it on the top of my head, I’m like, it’s impossible,” she said. “Is this a real place?”
Within a few days, she and Ben Stiller, directors and executive producers of the Apple TV+ series, headed to New Jersey – they followed the winding passage through an imminent three-legged white water tower shaped like a transistor radio. The building has been renovated since the photo was taken, but the developer has not reduced the impact of its company’s vulnerability.
“Some of me can’t believe how perfect it is.” Ms Gagné said she saw the mirrored building she saw in the summer of 2019. “It’s an exciting time.”
This will become Lumon Industries, which is the role of “dismissal”, just like an employee agreeing to cut off the brain through surgical procedures to split his work ego from his own homeland. The building is a breakthrough star: fans turned Bell Labs into Bell’s Bell Labs, now known as Bell Works, and became a social media darling on Instagram and Tiktok.
Decades before the buildings became an ode to fear of American companies, it was the creativity of Bell Telephone Lab, a research arm of 20th-century telecom giant AT&T. According to “Idea Factory”, it was nicknamed “Black Box” because its rectangular exterior is “Idea Factory”, a 2012 book about the rise and influence of Bell’s Laboratory, The Intellectual Utopia of the Times.
What is Bell Labs?
Researchers working at Bell Labs have discovered discoveries that will drive modernization. At its peak, Bell Labs employs about 15,000 employees, including 1,200 PhDs, distributed across various locations, many of whom are in New Jersey, where Bell Labs is based. One of the company’s locations is the 460 acres of Holmdel farmland purchased by the company in 1929. Scientists and engineers there pioneered the technology’s microwave, contact dialing, cell phones, and satellite and fiber optic communications. Holmdel’s Nobel Prize was the 1978 physics prize, which was the detection of creepy spatial sounds that proved the Big Bang theory.
For decades, Holmdel scientists have trained a modest single-story partition building in farmland, just minutes from Sandy Hook Beach. In 1958, the company hired Finnish-American architect Eero Saarinen to design modern and larger facilities for its growing workforce. This will be one of the final projects of Saarinen, the designer of the gateway arch in St. Louis and the TWA building at Kennedy Airport. He died in 1961, the year after the building opened.
The first office building using mirrored glass, a two-million-square-foot six-story structure designed to foster spontaneous creative interactions among the 6,000 researchers working there. Saarinen imagines that workers would meet each other on floating sidewalks or crowded with people on the lobby sofa. “From these conversations, new ideas come, so it’s a very modern idea,” said curator Donald Albrecht.
But offices and laboratories are windowless, and spaces do not realize their social aspirations. Jon Gertner describes the building as a “Monument to Architectural Assumptions” in “Idea Factory.”
Retired engineer Barry Kort was hired in 1968, where he worked for 19 years. “But I’ve never been to jail, so of course I didn’t bother me.”
Instead, Mr. Cotter, who was single in those years spent most of his time at Bell Labs until late at night and on weekends. Sometimes, he would hide from his home in a workshop and solder that needed repairs. “I almost lived there,” he said, and he even used the building as a mailing address.
What is now?
In 1982, the federal government resolved an antitrust case against AT&T, prompting the company’s division and ending its monopoly on the telecommunications industry. Within a few years, Bell Labs’ research declined. By 2006, the Holmdel building owned by French telecom company Alcatel-Lucent was facing possible demolition. International outcry in the scientific community saved it. In 2013, a new developer purchased and renovated the black box, transforming a quarter-mile atrium into an indoor promenade lined with shops, food courts and libraries. There is an office on the upper floor.
On a recent afternoon, people walked the dog and pushed the stroller through the atrium. Remote workers sitting on sunken conversation pit, sofa and tavern table sitting on laptop. Toddlers play on artificial turf and hang out on bean bags.
Bell engineering security guard Rick Ely stood in Rick Ely in the indoor Rick Ely, telling reporters that regular “severance” shootings would cause welcome disruption. The crew brought the ice into the ice through trucks, sprayed berths and trees with crushed ice, and laid snow blankets on the ground to create a timeless winter atmosphere for the show.
For Ms. Gagner, who directed the recent episode, Bell Labs felt like the metaphor of the show’s so-called “Innies” and “Outies” – Self and self. She said she saw the opaque glass facade “a reflection of the character.”
“They are really inside, much darker than the people outside,” she said.
