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By Marni Rose McFall
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The Lumon Building from the AppleTV+ show Severance is real, and you can visit it in real life.
The Context
The Sci-Fi TV show is immensely popular, with its second season currently airing, having debuted to a 100 percent score on Rotten Tomatoes. Starring Adam Scott, Britt Lower, Patricia Arquette and directed by Ben Stiller, the show follows the workers at Lumon Industries, where the staff have undergone brain procedures that make them forget their personal lives at work, and their work lives at home.
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What To Know
The real life Lumon building is located in New Jersey, a one-hour drive away from New York City, and was originally called the Bell Labs building, before later being renamed by redevelopers as Bell Works.
Located in the Holmdel Township of Monmouth County, for 44 years the building was used as a research and development facility. It was constructed between 1959 and 1962 and was one of the final projects of the Finnish-American architect Eero Saarinen, who died in 1961.
The building has now been redeveloped into a multi-purpose living and working space.
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The building covers 2 million square feet. Architectural Forum dubbed it the "Biggest Mirror Ever," thanks to its mirror box exterior.
The building has an atrium which runs for a quarter of a mile, which has been reimagined into a pedestrian street with restaurants and shops. It's open seven days a week and houses a library as well as a theatre and a farmers' market.
The complex has had a storied history, having been the site of a Nobel Prize discovery, the laser cooling work of Steven Chu, who was the 12th Secretary of Energy. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places back in 2017.
Severance is not the only TV series to have been filmed there, with The Crowded Room and Law & Order: Organized Crime having also been shot there.
The building has become the subject of fascination online, thanks to the popularity of the Severance show and videos of people visiting Bell Works have quickly racked up tens of thousands of views online.
One TikTok user shared a video of her going to visit the space, and said that she had previously interned in the building. Another user posted a tour of the building, in a TikTok which has been viewed over 50,000 times.
What People Are Saying
One Reddit user wrote: "Worked there when it was Bell Labs. Looks exactly the same as it did in the show as when I was there. Now it looks quite different since they re-developed it. The mountains they show in the background are not really there."
One social media user wrote on X: "The lumon building from severance is a five minute drive from my house. so sick. it's like if you could go work from a dharma initiative station."
Ben Stiller recently told Collider when speaking about the show's third season: "You have a responsibility to the audience that you're going somewhere with it. That's always been a part of it for us, really understanding where it's heading to, and Apple's been really supportive of that and sensitive to what the story is."
What's Next
New episodes of Severance are currently dropping weekly every Friday, until the finale on March 21. A third season of the show has been confirmed.
Update 03/10/25, 10:54 a.m. ET: This article has been updated with additional information.
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