![]() Historians called it an “ Industrial Versailles.” Inside, you’re met with a six-story-tall glass atrium that once held 3,600 trees, shrubs, and plants. When the late-afternoon sun hits the building’s reflective facade, it glows golden. When I look at buildings like that, there’s pride in the corporation and pride in being part of it.” And it is beautiful. “People had dance shows, their own farmers’ markets - they had everything in that place. “They really did try to create this perfect working, living world,” he says. When Hindle talks about Bell Labs, he sounds almost rapturous. ![]() The real-estate developer Somerset and Alexander Gorlin Architects remade it into a mixed-use office and commercial space in 2013, rechristened as Bell Works. Its architecture and history - its engineers and scientists earned nine Nobel prizes - contributed to a listing on the National Register of Historic Places. more Saarinen's 1962 design for Bell Labs was meant to be an idealized office for innovation. Its architecture and history - its engineers and scientists e. Saarinen's 1962 design for Bell Labs was meant to be an idealized office for innovation. “They’re there to dominate you and make sure that you know the rules.” It was the perfect backdrop for a show about a workplace with near-total control over its employees. “I always felt a sense of power in these spaces,” says Jeremy Hindle, the show’s production designer. It wasn’t accidental, of course, because Bell Labs represents the height of an era when offices were designed as a sort of corporate utopia, at least in the eyes of the people who made them. It was an extraordinary technology incubator. The laser, the cell phone, the Big Bang theory: They all came from here. This iteration of Bell Labs was - in the words of the institution’s biographer, Jon Gertner - an idea factory, the place whose thousands of scientists and engineers discovered or created so much that makes the modern world what it is. Designed by Eero Saarinen and opened in 1962, it was a showpiece for the monopolistic, cash-rich corporation that dominated American communications for the telephone’s first century. It’s in Holmdel, New Jersey, and it was the home of Bell Laboratories, the research operations of AT&T. Lumon is imaginary, but the building is not. ![]() The building is dead center in an elliptical suburban office park where the roads leading up to it and the parking that surrounds it are arranged in perfect symmetry. It’s a posture of corporate professionalism that’s reflected in the architecture of Lumon: an enormous mid-century mirror-glass box with an atrium that looks like a modernist cathedral. Why are there baby goats running loose? Why are people 3-D printing hatchets and watering cans? (Surely there are more effective ways to make gardening tools!) What the hell do all those coded numbers sent to the Macro Data Refinement office actually mean? As enigmatic as their work is, one thing’s for certain: They’re expected to perform their duties happily, respect the chain of command, and treat procedure like gospel. The fictional corporation at the heart of Apple TV+’s Severance is a massive place - and massively opaque. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968.No one who works at Lumon Industries knows exactly what the company does. In 2000, only thirty-six years after its completion, it was designated a National Historic Landmark as a testament to its value to the town and to postwar American architecture. Its otherworldly form has been copied many times since its completion, and it has become perhaps the most recognizable icon of Columbus. This church, of which he was so proud, was the last building he would ever design. Only one month after submitting the final version of his design, Saarinen passed away suddenly and unexpectedly at the age of 51, cutting tragically short the career of one of the twentieth century’s most accomplished and still-promising architects. Stark experiential changes in the journey from the exterior to the building’s interior reflect a deliberate transition intended to magnify the worshipper’s spiritual journey. From the earthy materials to the dramatic formal geometries, the architecture strives to create a religious atmosphere that is intimate, unique, and transcendent.
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