For a show known for its slow, methodical pacing, the second season of Severance begins with an uncharacteristically lively scene. Mark Scout (played by Adam Scott) appears within the lobby of Lumon Headquarters severed floor before taking off down one of many sterile white hallways. The panic gradually transitions into the uncanniness and foreboding were so used to in Lumons basement floor as a new team of employees, meant to replace his compatriots from season one, greets Scout. The midcentury office furniture, sterile white hallways, and pervading sense of alienation are welcome sights for viewers who have waited anxiously for three years to reenter Lumons dreaded severed floor. Severances story centers on the experiences of these severed employees, whose consciousness is split by implanting a chip into their brain, an innie consciousness they assume while working inside Lumon Industries classified severed floor and a consciousness they inhabit outside Lumon, and an outie consciousness that lives their lives on the outside without a relationship to what they do eight hours a day. Better in concept than in practice, Severance, season 1, saw the dual lives, innie and outie, of its four protagonists from Macrodata Refinement, run headfirst into each other in the season finale: Scouts innie realizes that theres something he must find for his outie in the bowels of Lumons headquarters, Hellys innie (played by Britt Lower) rebukes a room full of Lumons elite after realizing her connection to the company, Irvings innie (played by John Turturro) discovers his love life outside Lumon is more complicated than he realized, and Dylan Innie (played by Zach Cherry) realizes hes supporting more than just himself on his Lumon paycheck. Fans have been waiting for nearly three years for this second batch of ten episodes due partly to the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. So far, the wait has been worth it, as Severance, season 2, continues to dish up condemnations of corporate culture via haunting shots of midcentury modern office spaces and office intrigue that verges on eldritch horror.Bell Labs again plays the headquarters role for the mysterious and cult-like Lumon industries. (Christopher Payne/Esto)Office as OppressorSeverances production design and interior architecture serve as a representation of the oppressiveness of Lumon as a company towards its employees. I always felt a sense of power in these (corporate) spaces, Severances lead production designer, Jeremy Hindle, told Curbed in 2022. Theyre there to dominate you and make sure that you know the rules. Hindles interest in midcentury design is felt in how fully the corporate architecture pervades the cinematography of Severance: Employees sit at stark white modular cubicles; canted inset ceiling lights hum above their heads; a field of monotone green-blue carpet at their feet; and tiny, computer-like devices, reminiscent of an early Apple product or ripped from the set of Jacques Tatis Playtime, sit at the desks.Most notably, Bell Labs again plays the headquarters role for the mysterious and cult-like Lumon industries, for whom the cast works. Severance portrays an ominous version of one of Eero Saarinens final masterpieces, its mirror glass exterior is perpetually reflecting a dismal, wintry landscape, and whose grand atrium, now replete with cultish imagery of Lumon founder Kier Eagan, hangs over Lumon employees. Severance cinematographer Jessica Lee Gagn has cited the use of close-up shots, wider lenses, and robotic camera movements in scenes of the severed floor to evoke feelings of surveillance and paranoia, whereas visual inspiration for desolate and deadpan exterior shots of Bell Labs was inspired by photographer Lewis Baltz, whose work hauntingly depicts architecture and desolation. These cinematographic choices frame Bell Labs oppressiveness, helping to articulate thematic elements in Severance: control, isolation, and mundanity. However, Lumon HQ is shown to be capable of speaking to us itself in episode one of season two, as it scares employees and provides false histories via an animated, anthropomorphized Bell Labs character, voiced by Keanu Reeves.It is in Bell Labs mind-numbing network of bare white corridors where the terror begins to creep in. (Ezra Stoller/Esto)Can buildings be the stuff of nightmares? Joshua Comaroff and Ong Ker-Shings book Horror in Architecture argues that they can. Organized by typology, Horror in Architecture weaves dead and decaying corpses, structures stitched together, abnormal building proportions, contorted bodies, sinister doppelgangers, and others into a comprehensive study on architectural terror. Lumon HQ is most like Ong and Comaroffs Trojan Horse idea, in which the exterior expression of a building masks the schizophrenia laden on the buildings interior, like a shell or body inhabited by something foreign. The production team achieved this effect by shooting the exterior of Bell Labs on location in Holmdel, New Jersey, but filming scenes of Lumons severed floor on three sound stages in New York.Liminal vs. Shock HorrorWhile Bell Labs expressionless facade creates a sense of isolation, its mind-numbing network of bare white corridors is where the terror begins to creep in. The ploddingness of Liminal Horror opposes the immediateness of Shock Horror, which is most concerned with the thrill and a payoff. Tension builds throughout a scene until climax: an adrenaline shot usually via jumpscare. We likely have the popularization of slasher movies of the 80s, billed as fun, uncritical romps, to thank for the abundance of Shock Horror in films and TV today. On the other hand, Liminal Horror is an existential horror that ruminates on itself and demands an audience interrogate something rather than be hopped up on adrenaline. The discordance of Severances architecture creeps up on you in moments where the size of Lumons severed floor becomes sublime and terrifying when scales shift radically. In season 1, episode 3, the main cast visits a recreation of Lumon founder Kier Eagans two-story home, which is fully encapsulated within the underground severed floor.Helly and Scout wander through a tunnel on the severed floor into a full goat pasture. (Courtesy Apple News+)The liminal horror aspect of the show sneaks up on viewers. In season 2, episode 3, Helly and Scout wander through a tunnel on the severed floor into a full goat pasture, complete with goat-tending Lumon staff, wrapped with the same white paneled walls of the hallway and less animal-filled office spaces. These moments of wild scalar oddity contextualize the subtle moments of alienation the audience feels in the series, like the size of the Macrodata Refinements floorplate, given it hosts four solitary desks that sit in the middle of a field of blue-green carpet, or the endless repeating white paneled hallways.Bell Labs is an ideal architectural setting for crafting a liminal horror folktale about control and surveillance. Its mirror glass feels unremarkable and lifeless as its surface primarily reflects adjacent parking lots to passersby, only broken up by thin black vertical mullions. Once inside, a rigorous 6-foot grid, interpolated from the 3-foot exterior curtainwall grid, stretches across the interior of the building, wrapping into ceiling grids and forming the basis for interior partition alignments that repeat ad nauseam unobstructed throughout the corridors and glass partitions of Bell Labs 2-million square feet; an Orwellian conformity to the building module. Inspirations in EerinessIf you were to delve into the far recesses of the internet, youd find other media properties that feel aesthetically linked to Severances schizophrenic basement floor. Show creator Dan Erickson has cited several aesthetic inspirations for Severance, including liminal horror media like videogames The Stanley Parable and Superliminal. Among the precedents named by Erickson, and the closest to Lumons severed floor, is The Backrooms, a creepypasta that posits that the worst death imaginable would be to die alone, slowly, isolated from the outside world, lying on cheap yellow high pile carpet. (For those born before 2000 or who are not constantly online, a creepypasta is a horror story that functions like a post-internet urban legend, as its copied and pasted between different online forums, changing as it grows in popularity.)The exterior curtainwall of Bell Labs, the Lumon HQ, is apparent from the inside as well. (Christopher Payne/Esto)Like Severances severed floor, The Backrooms is a never-ending series of hallways and rooms, a labyrinth from which its residents can never escape. You enter the Backrooms by noclipping (a term borrowed from video games for when characters fall through the games terrain) through our reality, descending into a forgotten postmodern service space, corridors wrapped in ugly yellow wallpaper and smelly yellow shag carpet. Unlucky victims are doomed to wander The Backroomss labyrinthine hallways until they die a slow death of malnutrition. The Backrooms merges a back-of-house area of a dying mall from the 80s aesthetic with a despair that Samuel Beckett might appreciate to create a populist allegory for our alienation from decaying late-modern architecture.Labyrinths have been an architectural typology in storytelling since Theseus fought the Minotaur. They also figure in the totalizing sensibilities of modernity: In 1962, around the same time Bell Labs was completed, Borges released Labyrinths, a collection of short stories of immense cities filled with chaotic, unnavigable architecture and stories of companies taking control of every aspect of daily life, as in The Lottery in Babylon. The Backrooms could be part of Borgess mind-bending despair, but Severance seems to be steering toward the center of the severed floor and away from its liminal midcentury hell. There likely isnt a minotaur waiting for Scout and his compatriots there, but notably, the most rebellious actions by severed Lumon employees seem to be when they form solidarity, as Scout and Helly when they make a pact with the Mammalian Nurturable department, who herd goats in a large white room on the severed floor. Perhaps the only way out of the basement is together, goats and all.Charlie Weak is a designer, writer, and labyrinth enthusiast based in Brooklyn, New York