⛪️ The Longfellow church that redefined modern religious architecture

The Apple TV breakout hit show Severance, which streams the hotly anticipated finale of its second season tonight, features a recurring aerial shot of its malevolent company’s headquarters. It’s a boxy, symmetrical building wrapped in continuous mirrored glass and surrounded by an egg-shaped complex of parking lots and landscaping. Like everything else in the show, it's striking, mysterious, and meticulously put together. The New York Times described the complex as "the breakout star of the breakout hit" that's become a tourist destination for fans of the show.

The building is the real-life former Bell Labs complex in New Jersey. As AT&T's research arm, Bell enjoyed a Google- or Apple-like stature as one of the world's most important companies in the late '50s when it began planning the campus. So it did what any global giant at the peak of its powers would do: It hired one of the world’s most famous architects. 

That man was Eero Saarinen, a Finnish-American modernist and son of another famous architect, Eliel Saarinen. Eero was the celebrity architect of the day, responsible for projects like the St. Louis Gateway Arch, Washington D.C.’s Dulles Airport, the American Embassy in London, and General Motors’ headquarters outside of Detroit. In what was one of the midcentury's highest cultural honors, his face had recently graced the cover of Time Magazine.

The Bell Labs building would receive international acclaim and be one of Eero's final commissions before his death — but not the final one. The final one would be a modest addition to a neighborhood church in Longfellow.