The next story accommodates spoilers for Severance’s first and second seasons.
“Did you actually see the outie world? How’s the sky?” Gwendolyn Y. (Alia Shawkat), a brand new member of Lumon’s Macrodata Refinement (MDR) division, asks Mark S. (Adam Scott) within the first episode of Severance’s second season. “We made an inventory of what we’d most prefer to see on the skin,” she says, referring to the group of “innies” despatched from different Severed Ground departments as MDR alternative workers, “and a sky was a simple primary.” The surface world is a fixation for the present’s severed characters, nevertheless it’s not fairly as electrifying as they anticipate it to be.
The primary season of the hit Apple TV+ collection takes place largely within the claustrophobic atmosphere of the Severed Ground at Lumon Industries, the only real area of the innies. Within the second season, nevertheless, as Mark and the present’s different severed characters claw on the seams between their two lives, viewers uncover extra of the city of Kier and the broader “outie” world. The seems of the areas the characters inhabit appear to disclose some deeper messages about their intentions.
Eero Saarinen’s late-Fifties Bell Labs advanced in Holmdel, New Jersey, stands in because the Lumon Industries headquarters within the Apple TV+ collection, Severance.
Exterior and atrium photographs of Lumon’s headquarters had been filmed on the former Bell Labs advanced in Holmdel, New Jersey, designed by Eero Saarinen within the late Fifties as the house of AT&T’s analysis operations. (The midcentury company campus reopened in 2016 as a mixed-used workplace and business house generally known as Bell Works, which has just lately develop into one thing of a vacationer attraction for devoted Severance followers.) The imposing constructing’s mirrored-glass partitions and commanding symmetry match the disquieting visible metaphors for company management that manufacturing designer Jeremy Hindle infused into the constructed workplace units. The labyrinth of slim, white Severed Ground hallways sign the identity-less confusion of innie life, as an illustration. Hindle advised Curbed that Oscar Niemeyer’s use of monochromatic carpets (in areas just like the 1980 headquarters of the French Communist Get together) impressed the vivid inexperienced rug within the MDR workplace, and Saarinen’s modernist design for the John Deere Headquarters, completed posthumously by Kevin Roche in 1964, was one among his first references for designing the Lumon places of work.
The interiors comply with a strict palette of greens, blues, and whites, with any indicators of the pure world reserved for more durable to entry areas. The Wellness Heart, the place innies are rewarded for good habits with weird meditation periods which have impressed TikTok’s meme of the second, seems significantly completely different from even its ready space, with fake round skylights, darkish wood-paneled partitions and a round wood platform surrounded by Zen backyard stones, plus a tree and a live-edge pure stone desk. On the Severed Ground, nothing can are available in or out with the staff—even the work snacks are Lumon-branded. The one semblance of “personalization” on the innies’ cubicle desks are the group photographs they’re all given, that are unceremoniously modified when an worker departs. In mindset (although by no means in aesthetic), the Severed Ground brings to thoughts the aggressively stylized, experimental TBWA Chiat/Day places of work designed by Gaetano Pesce within the mid-’90s, the place staff had been reportedly solely allowed to show private photographs in lockers.
The blue townhouse the place severed Lumon worker Mark Scout (Adam Scott) lives seems nearly similar to the opposite new-builds round it.
Life outdoors of the Lumon places of work is way much less aesthetically succinct. This isn’t as a result of the detritus of on a regular basis life is extra current, although. Within the outies’ houses, private particulars are nonetheless sparse. If the severance process truly supplied a profit to those that had it, maybe the severed character’s houses would really feel extra joyful, however the areas within the present inform a unique story.
Take Mark’s house as an illustration, situated within the Lumon-subsidized Baird Creek neighborhood. Pushed to severance by the lack of his spouse, Gemma, he lives in a townhouse with little or no character. The furnishings are bland and the (undecorated) grayish-blue partitions have an nearly suffocating impact, consuming a lot of the body in uninterrupted swaths. All of the tchotchkes and images from his life previous to Gemma’s dying and his process are shoved within the basement in containers. Severed staff spend a lot of the sunlight hours underground, however even within the few photographs we see of Mark’s house in daylight, the house is crammed with shadows. In a flashback within the “Chikhai Bardo” episode, we see the home the place Mark and Gemma as soon as lived fortunately, with its copious pure mild, houseplants, books, and patinated classic furnishings. It seems to be older, perhaps Colonial-style, with an abundance of multipaned home windows and French doorways. It feels rather more welcoming; not good, however actual. In the meantime, Mark’s Baird Creek new-build is one thing of a darkish mirror of life at Lumon. Within the prior episode, “Attila,” when Mark is reintegrating and the photographs flash rapidly between his innie and outie lives, the viewers sees how uncannily comparable his kitchen and residing house is to the worker kitchenette on the Severed Ground.
Mark’s sister, Devon (Jen Tullock), and brother-in-law, Ricken (Michael Chernus), stay in a sprawling midcentury made from wooden, stone, and glass.
In establishing photographs, Mark’s home sits in a line of blue townhomes that look nearly similar to his. Each of the opposite innies whose houses we see on-screen are set inside complexes that repeat the identical construction kind, too—a suburb in Dylan’s (Zach Cherry) case, a brick house advanced within the case of Irving (John Turturro). Irving’s house is simply barely extra personalised than Mark’s, however each areas exude loneliness. Like Mark’s plain townhome, Irving’s house has a easy new-build kitchenette. This isn’t the residing house of somebody internet hosting vigorous dinner events; the house is subsumed by Irving’s work of a darkish hallway, what the viewers is aware of to be the menacing Testing Ground at Lumon. In stacks and stacks of work that fill Irving’s bed room, the corporate successfully dominates his outie’s life, too.
Up till “The After Hours” episode, which opens on the glass-and-steel mansion of Lumon CEO Jame Eagen (Michael Siberry)—filmed on the Taghkanic Home by architect Thomas Phifer—there was just one non-severed Lumon employee whose house had been proven. The Severance pilot reveals that Ms. Cobel (Patricia Arquette), the Severed Ground supervisor, lives subsequent door to Mark at Baird Creek below the guise of “Mrs. Selvig” so she will spy on his outie. Even her house’s geography is an indication of how intently her life is oriented round her work at Lumon. Inside, Cobel’s home is nearly jail cell–like, with cement flooring and unfinished partitions and a single mattress with a metallic body. She has just a few items of vintage furnishings (which foreshadows her household’s house that we see in “Candy Vitriol”) and a shrine to Keir, made up of previous ephemera, seemingly collected over her lifelong profession for Lumon, however little else. A fluorescent mild positioned above her mattress seems to be a logo of how deeply her work on the Severed Ground has penetrated her private life. When outie Mark says to who he thinks is Mrs. Selvig, “Work is simply work, proper?” within the first season finale, he couldn’t understand how unsuitable the goal for his message was.
The 1949 Bier Home by Kaneji Domoto is the filming location of Devon and Ricken’s house on Severance.
In contrast, the houses of characters not residing severed lives are notably extra attractive. Mark’s sister, Devon (Jen Tullock), lives in a sprawling midcentury-modern—the real-life Bier Home locally of Usonia in Pleasantville, New York, by Frank Lloyd Wright apprentice Kaneji Domoto—along with her oddball husband, Ricken (Michael Chernus). It’s wood-paneled with stone accents and enormous image home windows, and furnished with loads of the couple’s private relics. Equally, the house of now-retired Lumon worker Burt (Christopher Walken) and his husband, Fields (John Noble), shot on the 1955 Gerald Luss Home in Ossining, New York, makes use of natural supplies and showcases the couple’s suave tastes. There’s a Dansk pepper mill assortment, Verner Panton lighting fixtures, and a few eye-catching work. The 2 homes are a few of the solely areas the place we see smooth, combined lighting, the polar reverse of the Lumon workplace’s fluorescents. Although each are depicted extra warmly than is usually the case with the “evil” modernist houses trope (see: Jame Eagen’s home), they’re shot in a manner that also hints on the pervasiveness of Lumon’s management—even for these with much less of their livelihood tied up within the firm, like Devon and Ricken. In comparison with the lightness with which Gemma and Mark’s former house is shot in flashbacks, each midcentury-moderns look downright menacing, prompting some suspicion that the characters’ associations with Lumon may be deeper than they’ve let on.
In all their variation, the houses of each the severed staff and people free from Lumon’s grasp give viewers some tangible clues, too. Earlier than the viewers discovers that Mark’s late spouse and the Severed Ground “Wellness Director” Ms. Casey are the identical particular person, Ms. Casey makes use of a green-and-red candle in a Wellness session that’s earlier proven in a field of Gemma’s issues in Mark’s basement. Although we’d not have the ability to predict the precise destiny of the present’s characters by way of manufacturing design, there are definitely indicators ready to be found.
High photograph courtesy Apple TV+
