The Lumon building in the center of Dan Erickson’s “Severance” science fiction series “ is actually The Bell Labs Holmdel complex in Holmdel, New Jersey. The complex, designed by the architect Eero Saarinen, was to be a space suitable for workers, filled with large corridors and wide stairs, intended to be used for long and intense co-working sessions of Walk-Working while the employees moved from one laboratory to another. The generosity, however, ended up being alienated, and the employees of Bell Labs complained that it took an eternity to walk in the building, and that the building looked sterile and hostile.

Of course, large, hostile and sterile was perfect for a dark television series like “Severance”, so the Holmdel complex was happy. The building has been used by the city of Holmdel as a community center since 2006, and the owner of the building has won money next to rent it to cinematographic and televised productions. The building is currently belonging to a man named Ralph Zucker, the CEO of a company called Inspired by Somerset Development. He paid $ 27 million for the building in 2013 and paid additional $ 273 million for in -depth renovations. Zucker said in an interview with “Make It” that he kept the original concrete of the exposed building, making sure not to change the drawings of Saarinen too much. It was a lucky decision, because the Starkness drew the attention of the scouts of the location of the “Seèvée”. “Stark and Soulless” has become the aesthetics of Lumon Industries.

But it turns out that it was not the way Erickson originally wrote the Lumon building when he designed the series for the first time. In his mind, the Lumon building was not supposed to be something special. He loved the idea that Lumon works from a completely dull and completely indescribable office building, as we could see in the film “Office Space”. In an interview VarietyThe executive producer of “Severance” Ben Stiller noted that he was his idea of ​​transforming Lumon into something more inspired.

In the variety article, it is explained that Erickson, a television beginner at the time, was very deepened in his conception of the “starting semets”. He and Ben Stiller have set up important guides, full of physical architecture and reference photos of other movies and television shows. Stiller recalled Erickson’s idea that Lumon operated, in his words, a “banal office building from the 90s”. Fans of “seed” know that the Lumon building is not commonplace, but threatening.

The Lumon Building subsoil office, where a large part of the “help” takes place, is an artificially built set, and it carries a retro style aesthetic from the 1960s or perhaps from the 1980s. The carpets are a shade of green which fell into disgrace in 1968, and the computers are all large plastic CRT boxes with large keyboards. There are no mobile phones, no touch screens and no thin laptops. In a strange way, Lumon is timeless. Obviously, that the timeless retro-’60 / 80S was the contribution of Stiller. If the world of “dry” is filled with bizarre technologies to pick the brain, it is logical that it has a strange external insective insective.

Not that the “departure” would not have worked in a type of environment “office space”. Many banal office buildings from the 90s feel just as cut in the outside world as the Lumon building. In addition, if the building was more familiar to viewers, strange and cult horrors and the inexplicable goat’s sub -intrigues would have been much stranger and more nightmarish.

Of course, the work of the production designer Jeremy Hindle won prizes and put him on an appointment to the EMMY, so Stiller’s science fiction approach was ultimately effective. Indeed, the strange corridors were greatly inspired by the “Alien” set of Ridley Scott of 1979. Erickson’s original vision would have been interesting to see, however.