If you’ve actually watched Severance, you probably know that the Lumon headquarters where Mark and his friends go to work every day isn’t exactly the most welcoming building. If you’re the kind of person that just has to know whether you’re secretly severed, though, you can visit the real-life location where the exteriors of the Lumon headquarters are filmed.
As it turns out, the building is the Bell Works building in Holmdel, New Jersey. It was once the home of Bell Labs, the research arm for AT&T. The building is now home to multiple business, and according to reporting in Curbed, it was first designed in 1962 by architect Eero Saarinen and was opened as a mid-century office space.
Numerous cutting-edge technologies were developed in the building, including the basis for cell phones, before it was eventually abandoned in 2007. In 2013, though, the building was revived by developer Ralph Zucker, and its lobby and outdoor spaces are now often used as stand-ins for the Lumon headquarters.
Severance is not the first show to use the rather imposing exterior of the building, but it has become the show that most people associate the building with.
“I have heard that we have a lot more people coming in and taking pictures of themselves in the space,” Zucker told Curbed. “We have a whole team that works on social media, and they’re inundated.”
There is, unfortunately, no official tour of the building as it is still a workspace where actual people work. As such, you can only visit the exteriors or the lobby, which should be plenty for the Severance obsessed.
“We always understood that people would realize that this was not, you know, real life,” Zucker added. “Although Severance portrays the headquarters as this empty devoid-of-life space, in reality, we’re literally teeming with life.”
