[TUHS] Step Into the Real-Life Lumon Industries, the Breakout Star of ‘Severance’

[ron minnich]

Part of my 1983 interview trip to Bell Labs (Allentown, Piscataway, MH,
Holmdel, I recall) was at Holmdel, and the engineers there had little good
to say about the building.
My host apologized for the Holmdel offices.

Holmdel, designed by a World Famous Architect, with Big Ideas, reminds me
of an old rule: invariably, the ugliest building on campus is the
architecture college. That certainly is true at UCB, but applies to many
universities I've seen.

ron

p.s.  I was visiting the Empire right before dissolution, and they had to
explain the yellow tapes in Allentown that were going up in the hallways,
marking the future BellCore/ATT boundaries. At that time, 1983, more
semiconductors were made in PA, by Western Electric, than anywhere. The
Bell System had a voracious appetite for hardware.
p.p.s. Nope, didn't go there. One of my hosts gave me good advice: "don't
come here, just go get your PhD." So I did.


On Sat, Mar 8, 2025 at 1:22 PM Peter Weinberger (温博格) via TUHS <
tuhs at tuhs.org> wrote:

> Rob is overly generous about the space. But great work did happen there.
>
> On Sat, Mar 8, 2025 at 4:08 PM Rob Pike <robpike at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > As someone who worked there occasionally, I can say that it's an
> > amazing building but from a workplace perspective full of
> > architectural ideas that simply do not work in practice. No office has
> > a window - the outer walkways take all the windows, and all the
> > offices face a transverse corridor. (In a later ridiculously expensive
> > expansion for a building Saarinen said could never be expanded, they
> > gave the president's office a window on the end. You might have seen
> > it in the show.) Only artificial light therefore.The huge central
> > atrium is cool but of course its floor was soon filled with cubicles,
> > ruining the effect and eventually requiring a netting over it to stop
> > people throwing things on the workers below. And so on. Great work
> > happened there but the building, externally at least a straightened TJ
> > Watson, was a failure in my amateur opinion.
> >
> > What a dreary workplace it was.
> >
> > But the approach is nice, at least until the geese took over and
> > became serious menaces to arrivals.
> >
> > It's a fitting locale for the show. No use of the geese though. Maybe
> > they've moved on.
> >
> > I will say that with that (I think) opening shot of series of the
> > water tower, I shrieked.
> >
> > -rob
> >
> > On Sun, Mar 9, 2025 at 2:47 AM Rich Salz <rich.salz at gmail.com> wrote:
> > >
> > > Gift article about Holmdel facility...
> > >
> > > Bell Works, the setting of the hit serial for Apple TV+, is now a
> tourist attraction, drawing fans to the architectural wonder.
> > >
> > >
> https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/07/realestate/severance-lumon-industries-building-bell-labs.html?unlocked_article_code=1.2U4.9nGx.iMzMqZbSep6U&smid=em-share
>
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