Severance viewers are envious of the TV show’s eerie, retro-looking offices, which offer a level of design that is missing in modern-day workplaces, says production designer Jeremy Hindle in this interview.
“There’s a corporate world that I personally really miss,” Hindle told Dezeen. “It’s sad that people just work at a desk in a cubicle with overhead lighting – a mundane space where you’re supposed to spend your whole day.”
“People want to be in places where you feel like you’re meant to be, where you have a function and a purpose,” he continued.
Currently airing its second season on Apple TV+, Severance centres around four people employed by Lumon Industries – Mark, Helly, Dylan and Irving – who have undertaken a procedure that separates their memories, making them “severed”.
While at work, they have no memory of their lives in the outside world, forming an “innie” personality. Once they leave work, they retain no memory, continuing their day as their “outie” personality.
There is an eerie and unsettling look to the “severed floor” where the main characters work, hinting at the ominous intentions of their employer.
The characters travel down an elevator to the subterranean floor and walk through a maze of stark-white corridors before arriving at their large office space, which features gridded ceiling lights and desks huddled at the centre of a green-carpeted floor.
With the workplace the central focus of the TV show’s plot, Hindle wanted to design offices that inspired the fictional employees to produce their best work.
He was influenced by the John Deere Headquarters in Illinois, designed by modernist architects Eero Saarinen and Kevin Roche, and ultimately ended up using the Bell Labs building by the same architects in New Jersey as Lumon Industries headquarters.
Hindle was struck by the architecture of these 1960s offices and aspired for the interior spaces he designed for Severance to evoke the same level of creative inspiration.
“There was a powerful gesture in [Saarinen and Roche’s] designs,” Hindle said. “Bell Labs was a place to really be creative. I find offices now are so uncreative.”
“If you’re working in a space that’s really beautiful, where the attention to detail is so fine, how could you do bad work?” he continued. “How could you not be inspired? We really tried to build an environment for that sort of inspiration.”
Although the Severance offices are essentially places where innie characters are trapped underground with no way to see or access the outside world, Hindle argued that viewers admire the purposeful design of the workspaces.
“You kind of want to be there, which is weird,” he said. “I think young people are connecting to the show because they are looking for design.”
“They’re craving spaces to be more creative in, which I don’t think has been around for a long time,” he continued.
Informed by workspaces of the 1960s, Hindle wanted to create an environment that was visually different from modern offices and harkened back to a time when there was more work-life separation.
“[The office] didn’t have a description when I first read the script – it could have just been in a regular office where anyone works, and I wanted to make it more,” he said.
“The thing to me was if you’re going to be severed from work, you would be taken to a real workplace. I find workplaces now kind of ‘fake’ workplaces – they’re home-ish.”
“In the 60s, work was work. Your desk was beautiful, it had a pen and a Rolodex. There was no reason to stay 12 or 14 hours a day – you worked for eight hours and left,” Hindle continued.
“So I was like, if they’re just working, it’s just work – let’s design these spaces that are like designs of the 60s.”
Pivotal to the Severance plot is that the characters do not remember anything between their innie and outie lives, which fed into Hindle’s production design.
To prevent unintentionally jogging someone’s memory, items from the outside world are prohibited and everything used by innie characters is made by Lumon Industries. This gave Hindle some creative freedom in designing Severance’s props and furniture.
One of the more out-of-place pieces is the retro-looking computer monitors, keyboards and trackballs used by the main characters as they carry out their mysterious work duties.
“We started putting components together to create a real workspace that works, but it doesn’t make sense in the outside world – that also gave us a license to just have a ton of fun,” said Hindle.
“There’s a little bit of a God-like thing when we first started the show as everything is manufactured [by Lumon Industries] underground,” he continued. “They make everything, which gave us the opportunity to design everything [the characters] touch.”
Hindle used some existing furniture for the sets, which formed touchstones for the rest of the office design. This included a desk designed by Roche, chairs created for Chanel showrooms in the 1960s and 70s and pieces by industrial designer Dieter Rams, who was head of design at Braun from 1961 to 1995.
“Having these signature pieces in the show really inspired us,” said Hindle.
“This season, we really got into Mario Bellini, we had a lot more Kevin Roche, and Dieter Rams is a huge inspiration to us for the show – Braun is the ultimate quality of products.”
“These companies, like Lumon, have amazing taste and care about what they’re making – Lumon’s just evil this time,” he added.
One of the more memorable scenes from Severance so far takes place in a room with white walls, similar to the rest of the severed office, but with a hilly, grassy floor populated with goats.
Hindle explained that the set was built on a golf course to achieve a realistic-looking landscape.
“I wanted beautiful rolling hills, but they had to look absolutely real, which you could never build on a stage, it would look like Teletubbies,” he said.
Despite the obscurity of the settings in the innie world, Hindle said creating scenes in the outside world was more challenging as the locations had to maintain a sense of anonymity.
“The interior world is easier than the exterior – the exterior world is quite terrifying because the whole thing for the show is that we don’t know where we are,” he said.
“Other than a cell phone, there’s nothing that gives away what day or year it is – it doesn’t have a time or place stamp.”
“As soon as you see something recognisable, it takes you out of the story,” Hindle continued. “The most important thing to me is that the world feels real, but it’s still a little fantasy.”
The Severance season finale is released on Apple TV+ on 21 March.
Other recent stories featured on Dezeen that look at production design include an interview with The Brutalist director and a story on the set designs of Alien: Romulus.
The images are courtesy of Apple TV+.
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