The Office Design of Severance
Notes on Compliance and Repression
No big plot spoilers here if you haven’t watched Severance yet, but I will talk about the sets and the feelings the interior design and architecture contributes to the show.
This is quick list I made about the the interior design of what I noticed in the show Severance before started research for this article:
The green color of the carpeting. (Office workers as sheep?)
The unrelenting square grid of the ceiling
The table set up as a quad
The emptiness of the entire space, especially the relationship of the table where the workers sit compared to the size of the room.
Accents of blue on worker’s clothing; the domination of blue for everything in leadership.
The thing I associate most with the show is the feeling of being trapped inside the office and all the white walls. This article from Arch Daily shows a number of photos of Bell Labs, which was abandoned as an office space in 2007. The Architect Eero Saarinen designed Bell Labs, which when you see it here provides instant recognition for a video played for the severed near the beginning of season 2 as well as the numerous scenes of seemingly endless corridors of white.
Another article at Vulture on the office design offers unique insights on the choices for the show, like the effort that went into:
making sure the computers were unique and toy-like
the arrangement of the 4 desks into a cloverleaf with collapsable walls
the choices for artwork on the walls
Binge watching the show over the past 3 days left me with quite a number of my office-decor memories. I too once worked at a slightly different cloverleaf arrangement of desks - but without collapsible walls. One place had all the cement support columns painted a bright daffodil yellow. Another place was a room/pit of desks arranged around the perimeter of a room, the only touch of design being an Eames Hang-It-All to .. possibly bring us some cheer in between our trips outside to escape the frigid air conditioning.
If you know someone with an opinion on Severance and the vibe from the office, share this article.