Recently, I spent some time in New York for work. Ahead of long flights, in between panicking and recounting how many pairs of socks I’ve put in my suitcase, I like to imagine myself flying through the air with my laptop open getting work done. Writing, drawing, creating imaginary book layouts in InDesign... I imagine that the enclosed, inescapable, and utterly desensitizing environment of the airplane will somehow force me into productivity. Nothing inside the airplane is in my control. Even the lighting changes unpredictably. It’s almost like living an alternate life, separated from the one I live on ground-level.
Unfortunately for my attachment to the idea of productivity, I’m still the same person up there as I am down here, and my laptop and phone are the same tools that allow me to consume media instead of producing it. On this most recent trip, I decided to start watching Severance.
Now, two weeks later, I’m all caught up and I’m jumping in the discourse. I’ve positioned my diving board—unsurprisingly—over the “design” region of the discussion as I’ve seen folks online discussing the show’s aesthetic. Specifically, the aesthetic of the Lumon office’s “severed floor,” where the show’s main protagonists do their mysterious and important work.
The office in the show is cartoonishly clinical, conveying the same absurd-yet-a-little-too-real portrayal of work at a large company as something like the Music Dance Event. The white halls of the office are so uniform they could be procedurally generated. The cubicles are modular. Workers sit on chairs with steel tube frames.
Getting special attention in the second season, though, are a few pieces of the environment that viewers recognize from the real world: furniture and appliances designed by Dieter Rams, an idol in the design community and one of the progenitors of Braun’s now classic design style, to which the company itself ascribes three core principles: simplicity, order, and harmony.
The inclusion of Braun’s/Rams’ chairs, TVs, and stereos in season 2 has been called out by viewers online as special design touches, and their presence is far from incidental. From Artnet:
Rams also has several fans on the Severance production team, which has long sought out 1950s and ’60s designs that convey “power and control and commerce,” production design Jeremy Hindle told Variety in 2022. Even when Lumon’s employees left the office for an outdoor retreat in episode four, their tents were lit to replicate the glow of a ’60s radiant heater, Hindle said, so that “everything has a Dieter Rams look to it.”
It’s hard not to notice the dissonance between how much these objects are celebrated by design enthusiasts and how seamlessly they integrate into the environment of the show.
On the severed floor, it’s hard to imagine another aesthetic. For example, try picturing an ornate wooden console.
The warmth, softness, and decoration possible in such wooden forms would not only stand out, it would destroy the aesthetic effects of the office. Organic forms, soft materials, and decoration are stimulating. More than that, they contrast with the rest of the environment. Terrible for productivity.
In my view, these objects are not cameos. They are a direct tie back to our world—the viewer’s world—interrogating why we value the simple, objective, rigid objects in our lives.
There are parallels in Braun’s design approach and ideas like the objects of “pure form” Le Corbusier discussed in Eyes That Do Not See. A deliberate pairing back of stimulating elements that could distract or confuse. “Less, but better.” In other words, the same aspects that make these designs classic help them fit into a wholly manufactured, sanitized, and optimized environment. It’s an environment that is incompatible with the rich, organic, messy life experienced above ground.
The idea behind this refinement of form was precisely as Braun describes it: simplicity. Mass-produceable objects of great simplicity that could improve our quality of life through machined precision, eliminating all that is “unnecessary” or “trendy” in favor of a direct, clean aesthetic that only becomes exciting when it is decontextualized and placed in contrast with other objects. In Severance, this never happens.
Lumon, as (ostensibly?) a biotech company, appears to believe—with religious fervor—in this pursuit, and so their offices are a perfect home for the products of this line of thinking.
The interaction between object and subject, the tension between the mechanical and the living, the division between form and soul, are all at play in the show, and the inclusion of Rams’ most iconic artifacts (and many others inspired by them) seems like a clever attempt to pass a message to us, above ground.
