How the Other Half Lives

Saarinen’s caliginous Crystal Palace is the ideal headquarters for Severance’s vision of corporate supremacy.

Jul 29, 2025
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  • Severance is created by Dan Erickson and executive produced by Ben Stiller. Seasons 1 and 2 are streaming on Apple TV+.

The Bell Labs Holmdel Complex, designed by Finnish American architect Eero Saarinen for AT&T in Monmouth County, New Jersey, and completed a year after his fatal brain surgery of 1961, almost seems like a deathbed conversion, a repudiation of his crowd-pleasing, if never-quite-convincing, organicism. Outside, a procrustean rectangle wrapped in dark mirrored glass refuses the inquiring gaze. Inside, a severe open habitat of balconied walkways intended to create moments of interoffice happenstance instead forms a panoptic fishbowl. The stern and stumpy building forgoes the blandishments of Saarinen’s greatest hits—the gee-whiz frontier triumphalism of St. Louis’s Gateway Arch (1965), the jet-set Googie of JFK’s TWA terminal (1962), or the respectively botanical and maternal insinuations of his so-called Tulip (1955–56) and Womb (1946) furniture lines for Knoll. If the 1946 collection affixed connotations of reproductive human…

Moze Halperin knows a beautiful rock from a plain one.

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