The Hidden Meanings of Different Design Styles in "Severance"

The following story contains spoilers for Severance’s first and second seasons.

"Did you really see the outie world? How’s the sky?" Gwendolyn Y. (Alia Shawkat), a new member of Lumon’s Macrodata Refinement (MDR) department, asks Mark S. (Adam Scott) in the first episode of Severance’s second season. "We made a list of what we’d most like to see on the outside," she says, referring to the group of "innies" sent from other Severed Floor departments as MDR replacement employees, "and a sky was an easy number one." The outside world is a fixation for the show’s severed characters, but it’s not quite as electrifying as they expect it to be.

The first season of the hit Apple TV+ series takes place mostly in the claustrophobic environment of the Severed Floor at Lumon Industries, the sole domain of the innies. In the second season, however, as Mark and the show’s other severed characters claw at the seams between their two lives, viewers discover more of the town of Kier and the wider "outie" world. The looks of the spaces the characters inhabit seem to reveal some deeper messages about their intentions.

Exterior and atrium shots of Lumon Industries’s headquarters were filmed at the former Bell Labs complex in Holmdel, New Jersey, designed by Eero Saarinen in the late 1950s as the home of AT&T’s research operations. (The midcentury corporate campus reopened in 2016 as a mixed-used office and commercial space known as Bell Works, which has recently become something of a tourist attraction for dedicated Severance fans). The imposing building’s mirrored-glass walls and commanding symmetry match the disquieting visual metaphors for corporate control that production designer Jeremy Hindle infused into the built office sets. The labyrinth of narrow, white Severed Floor hallways signal the identity-less confusion of innie life, for instance. Hindle told Curbed that Oscar Niemeyer’s use of monochromatic carpets (in spaces like the 1980 headquarters of the French Communist Party) inspired the vivid green rug in the MDR office, and Saarinen’s modernist design for the John Deere Headquarters, finished posthumously by Kevin Roche in 1964, was one of his first references for designing the Lumon offices.

The interiors follow a strict palette of greens, blues, and whites, with any signs of the natural world reserved for harder to access areas. The Wellness Center, where innies are rewarded for good behavior with bizarre meditation sessions that have inspired TikTok’s meme of the moment, looks considerably different from even its waiting area, with faux circular skylights, dark wood-paneled walls and a circular wooden platform surrounded by Zen garden stones, plus a tree and a live-edge natural stone table. On the Severed Floor, nothing can come in or out with the employees—even the work snacks are Lumon-branded. The only semblance of "personalization" at the innies’ cubicle desks are the group photos they’re all given, which are unceremoniously changed when an employee departs. In mindset (though not at all in aesthetic), the Severed Floor brings to mind the aggressively stylized, experimental TBWA Chiat/Day offices designed by Gaetano Pesce in the mid-’90s, where workers were reportedly only allowed to display personal photos in lockers.

Life outside of the Lumon offices is much less aesthetically succinct. This isn’t because the detritus of everyday life is more present, though. In the outies’ homes, personal details are still sparse. If the severance procedure actually provided a benefit to those who had it, perhaps the severed character’s homes would feel more joyful, but the spaces in the show tell a different story. 

Take Mark’s home for instance, located in the Lumon-subsidized Baird Creek neighborhood. Driven to severance by the loss of his wife, Gemma, he lives in a townhouse with very little character. The furnishings are bland and the (undecorated) grayish-blue walls have an almost suffocating effect, consuming most of the frame in uninterrupted swaths. All the tchotchkes and photographs from his life prior to Gemma’s death and his procedure are shoved in the basement in boxes. Severed workers spend most of the daylight hours underground, but even in the few shots we see of Mark’s home in daylight, the space is filled with shadows. In a flashback in the "Chikhai Bardo" episode, we see the house where Mark and Gemma once lived happily, with its copious natural light, houseplants, books, and patinated vintage furniture. It appears to be older, maybe Colonial-style, with an abundance of multipaned windows and French doors. It feels much more welcoming; not perfect, but real. Meanwhile, Mark’s Baird Creek new-build is something of a dark mirror of life at Lumon. In the prior episode, "Attila," when Mark is reintegrating and the shots flash quickly between his innie and outie lives, the audience sees how uncannily similar his kitchen and living space is to the employee kitchenette on the Severed Floor.