Where Is Severance Filmed? The Real-Life Lumon Industries Location Explained

Dan Erickson's freaky dystopian drama "Severance" takes place in the perpetually snowy town of Kier, a remote city located ... well, it could be anywhere in the world. Fall we know, Kier a remote, deliberately isolated village under the control of Lumon Industries, a mysterious corporate monolith located in the center of town. The work that Lumon does is mysterious and important, but "Severance" has remained coy about just what it does, exactly. The show follows a quartet of workers in the "macrodata refinement" department, and it's their job to scan an unexplained database of numbers looking for clusters that make them feel fearful. They then sort the fearful numbers into a file. This, it seems, is contributing to Lumon in some way. 

Of course, the premise of the show is that the Lumon workers have been medically "severed," that is: when they enter their basement workspace, they lose all memories of their outside lives. At the end of the day, when they exit, they regain their original memories but lose all memories of their workday. This bifurcates their personalities, with one person, their "outie" only remembering their home life and their "innie" only remembering the office. Their work-life balance is aggressively enforced thanks to a sci-fi device implanted in their brains. 

As the show has progressed (it's finishing up its second season as of this writing), Lumon has become more threatening and strange. They worship a Henry Ford-type figure named Kier Eagan (the town was named after him), and their work involves goats (!), but also strange forms of psychological torture. The Lumon building, as a result, has become more and more terrifying with each passing episode. It is a wicked edifice devoted to corporate soullessness. 

And it's real! The Lumon building is played by the Bell Labs Holmdel Complex, located in Holmdel, New Jersey. It's about a one-hour drive from Manhattan.

The Bell Labs complex was designed by architect Eero Saarinen, who is perhaps best known for constructing the Gateway Arch in St. Louis, Missouri. He also designed that cool-looking TWA hotel at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York, and the General Motors Technical Center in Warren, Michigan. Saarinen has an eye for outside, sleek-looking industrial spaces. The exterior of the Bell Labs complex was designed to be reflective all the way around and has been called the World's Largest Mirror by certain architectural digests. 

Saarinen passed away in 1961, and the complex has grown considerably since then, but the basic design remains the same. It's a large mirrored "curtain" located in the middle of an outside elliptical path. From the air, it looks like a giant goat's eye. The Lumon water tower (seen in the picture above) is actually part of Saarinen's design as well, although it hasn't been in use for decades. 

Bell Labs, as many may know, was the research company that grew out of the world's first telephone company, founded by Alexander Graham Bell. According to the National Geographic website, some of the earliest lasers were developed at the Holmdel building, as was spatial radiation relating to theories about the Big Bang. It seems that in the late 1940s, a lot of major corporations tried to lure hard-working scientists away from their cushy government jobs by building ultra-modern, comfortable, high-tech campuses like the Holmdel complex. It worked, and a lot of scientists entered the private sector. 

The cinematographers on "Severance" have made the Lumon building look empty and bleak, so it may be odd to learn that the building was designed to be open and friendly. The New Jersey Evening News wrote an article about the then-new building in 1961, and it was said to be so wide as to avoid unnecessary foot traffic. The halls were wide. The staircases were wide. The whole operational ethos was wideness. It was meant to foster a sense of community and collaboration, a place where people could have walk-and-talk meetings on the way to the laboratories themselves. 

According to the National Geographic article, though, Saarinen's final project was not successful. Some of the Bell Labs employees were said to complain about how sterile the building was, making it feel decidedly unfriendly. Also, the wideness of the building put a lot of its hallways far apart, making it that much more difficult for employees to reach each other. Collaboration was harder under these circumstances. 

Then, in an additional blow to its functionality, the building had to undergo major renovations when the technology it was built to house started to change. The building changed hands multiple times over the decades and was eventually abandoned in 2006. It was going to be torn down, but locals protested, insisting that it be declared a local landmark. Eventually, the complex was reimagined as a mixed-use mall-like building that hosts a local library, a theater, and a community center. 

And it makes a lot of money by renting its space as a shooting location for "Severance." The exteriors and the large-scale interiors are part of the Bell Labs building. The all-white basement hallways where Mark S. ("Party Down" star Adam Scott) and his team work is a separate set. 

As mentioned, the town of Kier is perpetually snowy, giving viewers the impression that it's never warm in this town. While one might get the impression that the showrunners had to trek north of the Arctic Circle to film these scenes, an article in People Magazine clarifies that the show's exteriors are all filmed in New York. Mark S. — or rather, Mark Scout as he's known outside of the Lumon building — lives in a small tract house that is located in Nyack, which is just across the Hudson River from Sleepy Hollow. Downtown Kier, which isn't exactly a bustling metropolis, is filmed in the city of Beacon, which is just a few more miles north up the Hudson. The (perhaps integrated?) character of Irving (John Turturro) lives in a boxy apartment complex, and that building is located in the town of Kingston, a few more miles up the same river. One could take a boat up the Hudson and make a little "Severance" location tour. 

There are other snowy locales in "Severance" as well. In a recent episode, Ms. Cobel (Patricia Arquette) returns to her hometown, the fictional Salt's Neck, to retrieve something from her childhood home. Salt's Neck is a run-down, former factory town, wounded by the closure of a Lumon production plant. All the Salt's Neck sequences, including the long, snowy roads to get there, were filmed in Canada, specifically in Newfoundland and Labrador, located in the country's northeast. No, the whole of the islands don't look like the run-down town of Salt's Neck.

The second season of "Severance" also saw the four lead characters on a team-building field trip to a frozen campground called Woe's Hollow. Woe's Hollow was played by the rather lovely Minnewaska State Preserve, located a 90-minute drive north of Nyack.

One of the more surreal visuals of "Severance" was the appearance of what fans called the Goat Room. While wandering the halls of Lumon's basement, Mark and Helly (Britt Lower) find a room where a man is feeding a baby goat with a bottle (!). In the most recent season, the pair return to the same room, push their way through a small hallway and find themselves in a vast, hilly space covered in grass. Goats graze openly and they are overseen by farmer-like people. Disturbingly, the whole space is enclosed in white office walls, and boring office lights blaze from a ceiling overhead. This is called, by Lumon, the Mammalian Nurturability Room.

As it turns out, the Mammalian Nurturability Room was a real place. In fact, it's just a portion of the Marine Park Golf Course in Brooklyn. It's further south than all the other locations. The showrunners filmed there, although complex digital effects were used to create the office walls and ceiling. Also, a lot of the goats are arranged via CGI. 

Another notable location on "Severance" is the Perpetuity Wing, a museum-like place located in the basement of Lumon where innies are sent to get a strange form of corporate inspiration. The Perpetuity Wing tells the story of the Eagan family — the family that founded Lumon — and contains weird statues and even a whole house. It, like everything in the basement, is surrounded by office walls. Scenes in the Perpetuity Wing, as described in Thrillist, were filmed in an unknown museum in the Bronx, but the Kier Eagan home was actually part of an exhibit at the Hudson River Museum in Yonkers. That, too, is a place you can go visit.