Beyond the Village and Back, Severance Edition: Bell Labs Holmdel Complex

In our series Beyond the Village and Back, we take a look at some great landmarks outside of Greenwich Village, the East Village, and NoHo, celebrate their special histories, and reveal their (sometimes hidden) connections to our neighborhoods.

The headquarters of the fictional Lumon Industries, featured in the hit Apple TV show Severance, perfectly captures the eerie and striking visual style of the series, conveying a corporate disembodiedness that has led many to assume it was created just for the show. But in fact, the very real Bell Works complex exists, tucked in the rural landscape of Holmdel, New Jersey. 

While its starring role in Severance, a show about Lumon employees who have agreed to “sever” their work self from their home self, has catapulted the office complex to viral fame, its history of architectural and cultural importance spans decades. Today, we will take a closer look at this breathtaking site, and trace its historic connections to, and roots in, our neighborhood.

History and Architectural Significance

Bell Laboratories is a research and development company that was once a subsidiary of AT&T, a telecommunications giant of the 20th century. At its height under AT&T, Bell Labs, then headquartered in New Jersey, had over 15,000 employees, many of whom would become Nobel Prize winners for inventions created while working at the company.

In 1958, Bell Labs hired Finnish architect Eero Saarinen to design a new office building and complex in Holmdel that would act as their headquarters. Saarinen, who also designed the St. Louis Gateway Arch and the TWA building at JFK airport, then began work on what would become the Bell Labs building, though he would pass away in 1961, one year before its completion.

The completed six-story Bell Labs building contained a whopping 2 million square feet of space. The modernist design nodded to a new vision for workspace architecture. Its open, floating walkways and high-ceilinged lobby were intended to encourage spontaneous interactions between coworkers. Notably, the building was enclosed in reflective glass that blended the towering office structure with its natural surroundings. While mirrored glass buildings are plentiful nowadays, the Bell Labs building was the first office building to use such a material for its facade.

During the time that Bell Labs inhabited the Holmdel headquarters, many notable discoveries were made. The 1978 Nobel Award in physics was given for work done at the headquarters, detecting the eerie space sounds that proved the Big Bang theory. Additionally, the first cell phone call was received at the Bell Labs building.

From 1982 to 1985, Eero Saarinen’s design partners, Kevin Roche and John Dinkeloo, oversaw additions to the building’s east and west ends. These additions maintain the configuration, volume, massing, circulation pattern, and material palette of the original building. The site was given national landmark status in 2017.

A Leader in Adaptive Reuse

In the 1980s, cases against AT&T’s monopoly in the telecommunications industry were settled, and Bell Labs broke off from the conglomerate. Within a few years, the Bell Labs building was in decline, and by the early 2000s, then owned by French telecommunications company Alcatel-Lucent, the building was looking at possible destruction.

In 2013, the Somerset Development Team, spearheaded by Ralph Zucker, took over and helped secure mixed-use zoning for the site. Now called Bell Works, the building includes office, retail, entertainment, and restaurant spaces. The towering lobby acts as an unofficial town square, and the building receives between 1,000 and 2,000 visitors daily.

The Village Connection

The Holmdel Bell Lab Complex is neither the corporate giant and research innovator’s first such laboratory center, nor the first time its structures were abandoned and adapted to newer uses. What we now know as Westbeth Artists Housing in the Far West Village, bounded by West, Bethune, Washington, and Bank Streets, began life as a much smaller complex built in 1868 for Western Electric. In 1898, Bell Labs took over, turning the building into one of its critical research centers, and adding most of the extant sections of the sprawling complex that we know today (the original Western Electric section is the relatively low-rise arched section that hugs the corner of West and Bank Streets).

At the West Village site, Bell Labs demonstrated the first talking movie, the condenser microphone, the first TV broadcast, and the first binary computer.

But in the post-World War II era, Bell Labs’ needs were extending beyond what could be provided at the West Village waterfront site. And as that area de-industrialized, with shopping piers and factories closing, Bell began to look for other options in greener, more wide open pastures. As previously mentioned, in 1958 they began construction of the new Holmdel Bell Labs facilities. With that complex open in the early 1960s, by 1966 Bell Labs gave up the ghost completely, and vacated the site completely — severing itself, so to speak, from its Greenwich Village roots.

Following Bell Lab’s departure from the site, the Greenwich Village complex was transformed for residential use through a partnership between the National Endowment for the Arts and the J.M. Kaplan Fund. This visionary project aimed to provide subsidized housing for artists to live and work, and was what would become Westbeth. When the redesigned building opened in May of 1970, it achieved just that. Over the years, Westbeth has been home to individual artists and cultural institutions across a variety of disciplines, including music, theater, visual arts, and writing. In 2011, Village Preservation succeeded in getting all of Westbeth landmarked.

Interestingly, Westbeth, redesigned from the old Bell Labs by a young then-unknown modernist architect named Richard Meier (whose works clearly reflected the inspiration of Eero Saarinen), is notorious for its endless twisting hallways in which one could easily get lost, and its seemingly inscrutable pattern of spaces found in disparate sections of the building with unclear relationships to one another. So while the Greenwich Village Bell Labs begat the Holdel Bell Labs, arguably the Holmdel Bell labs begat Westbeth. So is Westbeth Holmdel’s “innie?” Or is it the other way around?