The meaning behind the real-world architecture in ‘Severance’

Severance is a set design wonderland. From a massive mirrored corporate monolith in New Jersey to a classical train station in upstate New York, the show’s distinctive visual language—which has captivated audiences and critics alike—relies on actual places that have been carefully chosen to mess with your head.

These aren’t just random pretty buildings. They’re psychological weapons that connect the dots in the same way the writers weave the tapestry of the tale. Severance follows a group of humans that go through a procedure to separate their (outie) real lives from their (innie) corporate bees working for a mysterious industrial conglomerate call Lumon, effectively turning four people (Mark, Helly, Irving, and Dylan) into eight, each with distinct personalities and circumstances. In the same way, the show divides its architecture, confronting an inner corporate hellscape to an outside world that, in its own way, is also its own hellscape. 

In its second season, Severance has expanded way beyond the creepy white corridors in the “severed” underground floor of Lumon Industries’s of the first season. The show ventures into a more diverse architectural playground that deepens its exploration of corporate control and our fractured modern psyche. The show’s filming locations now span from New Jersey to upstate New York to Newfoundland, each chosen not just because they look cool on camera, but because of the subliminal messages their architectural features convey.

The Lumon headquarters

The most iconic location in Severance is Lumon Industries’s headquarters—a massive, imposing structure that looms over the landscape like some corporate Death Star. In reality, this architectural marvel is the Bell Labs Holmdel Complex (now known as Bell Works) in New Jersey, a building whose real-world significance perfectly aligns with its fictional role.

“All those companies in the ’50s and ’60s, they had so much style, they had the most beautiful spaces, and they were proud of what they were doing,” explains Jeremy Hindle, Severance’s production designer, in an interview with Variety. “These corporate spaces are designed to dominate you and make sure that you know the rules.” No kidding. That’s exactly what makes Severance so viscerally disturbing—and so visually compelling. The architecture isn’t just pretty. It’s predatory.

Designed by renowned architect Eero Saarinen in 1958 and completed in the early 1960s, the Bell Labs complex stands as one of the most significant examples of mid-century corporate modernism in America. Its vast mirrored glass façade earned it the nickname “The World’s Largest Mirror” in architectural circles—a fitting metaphor for a show about reflection and duality. The building spans 2 million square feet with a central open-atrium scheme extending a quarter-mile.

When Saarinen designed the complex for Bell Telephone/AT&T researchers, it was conceived as a utopian workplace meant to foster community and collaboration. The central atrium was designed to encourage chance encounters between researchers from different departments—a physical manifestation of the cross-pollination of ideas, a concept that has been reproduced in many other corporate buildings, like Pixar’s and, most recently, Lego’s new HQs.

Yet in Severance, this same architecture becomes oppressive and isolating. The cinematography transforms Saarinen’s idealistic vision into something cold and menacing—a very literal visual metaphor of how corporate utopias often become dystopias in practice. As architectural historian Jon Gertner told Curbed, Bell Labs was an “idea factory” but, in Severance, it became a factory for something far more sinister: the manufacturing of compliant workers through the literal division of consciousness.

In Season 2, aerial shots reveal the building’s distinctive shape, which from above resembles a giant goat’s eye—a visual connection to the show’s recurring goat imagery and themes of surveillance. The water tower stands as a sentinel, further emphasizing the company’s technological dominance over the landscape and its employees’ lives. It’s like the Eye of Sauron, but for corporate America.

While Bell Works provides the exterior shots, the labyrinthine white hallways of Lumon’s severed floor were constructed at York Studios in the Bronx. These stark, minimalist corridors—with their fluorescent lighting, white walls, and complete absence of windows—create a timeless, placeless quality that reinforces the severed employees’ disconnection from the outside world. Season 2’s opening sequence features Mark running through these disorienting corridors, a scene that required weeks of planning and several days to shoot using a high-speed robotic camera called the Bolt. The design deliberately disorients viewers, making it impossible to create a coherent mental map of the space—mirroring the fragmented consciousness of the severed workers themselves. It’s architectural gaslighting at its finest.

This season we also got to see the surreal Mammalian’s Nurturable Room, where they have the goats. The production team built an enclosed tent on Brooklyn’s Marine Park Golf Course, with Industrial Light & Magic rendering the walls and ceiling in CGI. This hybrid of physical and digital architecture creates a dreamlike space that exists somewhere between reality and fantasy—much like the severed state itself. The blending of real and virtual elements mirrors the show’s exploration of how memory and perception shape our experience of space.

The Great Doors factory

Season 2 introduces another corporate space: the Great Doors factory. It’s the opposite of Lumon HQs, but no less oppressive. This is where Dylan—one of the four protagonists—looks for a new job after being fired from Lumon. He gets interviewed but not hired because he had the severance procedure to split his brain’s consciousness. Fun fact: Severance’s creator Dan Erickson was actually working in a door factory when he came up with the idea for the TV series.

The real location is the Red Owl Collective in the Midtown Arts District, in Kingston, a city in upstate New York. This 10,000-square-foot antique, vintage, and design emporium provides a richly textured industrial backdrop that contrasts with Lumon’s sterile environment while still conveying themes of labor and production. 

What makes these corporate spaces so effective in Severance is how they embody what architect Rem Koolhaas has called “junkspace”—environments designed not for human comfort but for corporate efficiency, where workers become interchangeable parts in a machine. The architecture doesn’t just house the corporation; it is the corporation made physical—a concrete and glass manifestation of power structures that shape human behavior and identity.

Brick and mortar split personalities

If Lumon’s corporate architecture represents power and control, the residential spaces in Severance show more intimate themes of identity and memory. Mark’s and Irving’s apartments, filmed at the Village Gate Townhouses in Nyack, NY, and in the Waterfront at the Strand in Kingston, NY, respectively, are also featured in this season. Both represent each of their outie’s mental states: barren despair for Mark, and dark despair for Irving. Season 2 expands the show’s exploration of domestic architecture to visually reinforce the psychological state of characters caught between their innie and outie existences, introducing Dylan’s residence.

In the real world, his familiar middle-class residence is at Kings Landing Condominium on Oxford Lane in Middletown, New Jersey. What’s fascinating about this location is the vision we get from above in one of the episodes. Some see a uterus, others Lumon’s logo upside down. I see both, perhaps an allegory to one of the show’s underlying themes: human reproduction.

The other side of this coin is the Eagan’s family residence, the owners of Lumon. It’s a massive glass structure visible in aerial shots near the Lumon headquarters, controlling it from afar. Home of the Helly E(gan)—the outie of innie Helly R—is truly a dream home. The modernist house embodies a cruel irony: the transparency that the Eagans deny their workers, they enjoy for themselves. They can see out while keeping others from seeing in. The architectural juxtaposition between the workers’ homes and the Eagan residence visually reinforces the show’s themes of class division and power imbalance.

If you are fascinated by this home and want to know where it is, you are not alone. I spent a few hours researching this one and it doesn’t seem to exist in the real world. Like other sets in the show, it appears to have been built as a set and enhanced with digital effects. In the architectural apartheid of Severance, buildings always tell us who has power and who doesn’t. The Eagans live in a house where they can see everything, while their employees live in spaces where they can only see what the company allows them to see.

Public spaces between worlds

Season 2 of Severance ventures beyond the corporate and domestic realms to explore a variety of public spaces that serve as transitional zones between different states of being. These liminal spaces—train stations, parks, gateways—seem to physically embody the show’s central concern with boundaries and thresholds, particularly the boundary between severed and unsevered consciousness.

One of Season 2’s most architecturally significant new locations is Utica’s Union Station, featured in Episode 9, titled “The After Hours.” Built in 1914 and designed by Allen Stem and Alfred Fellheimer—the same architects behind Grand Central Terminal—this classical train station with its impressive marble pillars provides the backdrop for an emotionally charged scene between Burt and Irving. It’s a beautiful space, grand architecture that speaks to an era of transition and movement, making it the perfect setting for a pivotal moment for the characters that resonates with the idea of splitting lives like the severing process does. The classical architecture creates a sense of permanence and history that contrasts with the transient nature of the characters’ meeting.

The production spent approximately $2 million filming at this location for just two days in May 2023, adding fake snow to maintain the wintry Season 2 aesthetic. This transformation of a historical space into a fictional moment is a good example of how Severance uses real architecture as raw material for its psychological landscape. 

The location also had another less obvious connotation. When the scene ends, Irving takes the 2400RR line, a historical scenic line in the Adirondack Railroad, which begins in Oneida County and ends in the Genesee Counties. “If you know anything about cults, those two places should certainly ring several bells,” points out one redditor in the Severance subreddit. “Mormonism was founded in the Genesee Counties. […] The Oneida Community was a strange highly Puritanical yet also ‘free love’ (deviant sex encouraging, quasi-communist Christian sect that was founded in Oneida County in the latter half of the 20th century.” This clearly connects with Lumon Industries’s nature, which has an extremely dark background featuring a mythical origin story, a god-like founder, strange sex and corporate rituals, blind obedience, and child abuse, among other niceties. 

Some of Season 2’s most striking settings were filmed at Minnewaska State Park Preserve in New York’s Shawangunk Mountains. Used for both the Dieter Eagan National Forest in Episode 4 and the haunting Woe’s Hollow scenes, these locations leverage natural architecture—dramatic cliff views and frozen landscapes—to create environments that feel simultaneously beautiful and threatening.

The Mohonk Testimonial Gateway in New Paltz, NY, returns in Season 2 as the entrance to the Damona Birthing Retreat. Built in 1908 as the formal entrance to the Mohonk Mountain House resort, this historical gatehouse creates a literal threshold between worlds—a perfect architectural metaphor for the show’s exploration of divided consciousness. In Episode 9, this gateway serves as the access point to Cabin 5, reinforcing its role as a transitional space between different states of being.

Downtown Beacon continues to serve as the fictional town of Kier in Season 2, with the Beacon Building on Main Street functioning as the Hall of Records. The repurposing of this real small-town architecture creates a setting that feels simultaneously familiar and slightly off-kilter—a visual strategy that reinforces the show’s themes of distorted reality.

Other transitional spaces include a set prop phone booth constructed in front of a closed car repair shop near Kingston’s Wurts Street Bridge, and the shed featured in Season 2, Episode 3 “Who Is Alive?” positioned below Kingston’s Rondout Train Trestle. These constructed elements within existing architectural contexts show how the production designs spaces that connect the severed and unsevered worlds.

Season 2 also ventures beyond New York state to the Canadian province of Newfoundland and Labrador for the Salt’s Neck sequences. These locations portray a run-down, former factory town wounded by the closure of a Lumon production plant. The remote, snowy landscapes contribute to the show’s atmosphere of isolation while the abandoned industrial architecture serves as a warning about the consequences of corporate abandonment—a ghost town that represents the ultimate symbol of Lumon’s disposable view of human labor.

Which brings me to the ultimate point: Severance itself, its physical worlds, embodies the ultimate innie-outie dichotomy. A show that is both depressing with glimmers of hope, but ultimately depressing again. Every episode, I wonder if our protagonists would triumph against this techno-capitalists sect (I’m sorry, but I get Apple vibes all over, and I’m guessing its executives are not into the joke) or disappear into the oblivion of forgetfulness in the innies’ world and the carcass of mortal decay in the outies’ world. The answer will probably be both.