What’s Happening: The hit Apple+ series explores the search for tech solutions to work-life balance, set in an off-kilter landscape of Midcentury Modernism.

The Download: In Severance, the limited tragicomic series written by Dan Erickson and directed by Ben Stiller, a company town called Kier serves as home to the eerie Lumon Industries. Lumon’s employees live in drab masses of company housing, and work in a mirrored monolith surrounded by a regimented maze of company parking. Outside, cast-members including Adam Scott exist, shattered by grief and other symptoms of life, in dimly-lit small-town simulacra; Scott and others undergo a strange new kind of brain surgery that separates their consciousness from time spent on and off the clock. Inside, he and cast-members including John Turturro and Britt Lower perform strange data tasks in a minimalist fantasia on corporate Modernism, unaware of what goes on beyond business hours but supervised by oddball all-stars like Patricia Arquette and Christopher Walkin.

Severance’s sci-fi storytelling is grounded in familiarity: Eero Saarinen’s iconic—and recently restored—Bell Labs building in New Jersey plays the part of corporate HQ. Production designer Jeremy Hindle found clues to how companies established authority using architecture and design via another Saarinen project, the rugged Cor-Ten complex he designed with Kevin Roche for John Deer in Moline, IL. At Lumon, whose aesthetic inspiration comes from the Lars Tunbjor book Office about liminal Swiss office design of the 80’s and 90’s, the floor plan isn’t so much open as uncertain, with a four-pack of cubicles—a $100,000 set piece dubbed the diamond desk by producers—sited on carpeting as green as cheap backyard artificial turf in vast fields of white space. Expansive, bright hallways dislocate as much as circulate; Hindle built each to the same width, then disrupted the wayfinding with digital trickery. Every supply, from nostalgic coffeemakers to trackball-operated computers Kraftwerk would have loved, is standardized with the eye-catching Lumon logo Hindle conceived with graphic designer Tansy Michaud.

Stiller frames the series with a rigor that would satisfy Wes Anderson, inflected by a surrealism that calls back Terry Gilliam’s Brazil. Lines, poles, and other details often appear in the center of the screen, implying an even division that mirrors the split in the characters’ consciousness. But the eye can’t be trusted: the notion was “trying to make things that were symmetrical, but it’s slightly wrong, because it’s the show,” Hindle tells Variety. “Everything’s just a little bit off, which is really uncomfortable.”

In Their Own Words: “All those companies in the 50s and 60s, they had so much style, they had the most beautiful spaces, and they were proud of what they were doing,” Hindle tells Variety. “They believed in it and their aesthetic was part of that. It was about power and control and commerce and everything rolled into one.”

Surface Says: Severance might pay homage to Jacques Tati’s Playtime, but at heart it’s got work on its mind—and we doubt the grim picture it paints of office life will help inspire workers to want to return anytime soon.

In 2016, the Brazilian Modernist Isay Weinfeld audaciously ushered in a new era for New York’s famous power lunch haven, the landmarked Four Seasons Restaurant, which exited its famous Philip Johnson–conceived environs inside Mies van der Rohe’s Seagram Building. Opening to much hullabaloo, its lifespan lasted a mere ten months. (The teak-and-bronze mirrored space pleased some critics and reportedly displeased its controversial investors.)

This spring, the Brazilian luxury hospitality company Fasano Hotel, who have worked with Weinfeld on properties across Brazil, reinvented the space as a casual osteria with an ample bar that posts the menu—mostly lunchtime classics like soups and rucola con Parmigiano Reggiano—on mirrors. In the neutral main and smaller private dining rooms, a silver cart swans across the plush carpeting and expanses of warm woods sourced in Brazil, offering bollito misto to diners bathed in the discrete up-lighting that just might transform Weinfeld’s controversial bronze columns into the kind of flashy minimalism Johnson always favored.

Coachella, with its hundreds of bands and thousands of revelers ignoring them for TikTok while reportedly generating some 107 tons of garbage per day, returned for 2022 after two long years off due to the pandemic. The Art Program, however, is not trash. This year, 11 installations were commissioned from global artists, architects, and designers. Like the main stage headliner Megan Thee Stallion, six of them are making their Coachella debut.

El Paso duo LosDos crafted the towering La Guardiana figure, defender of immigrants, while New York’s Oana Stănescu calls her pair of plant-filled steel canine statues Mutts. These welcome symbols of protection and affection join Cocoon, fashioned by Argentina’s Martín Huberman from some 300 BKF “butterfly” chairs, each of which might rightly be coveted by punters after long days in the sun, as might the ice that forms an ersatz-igloo in one of the Dutch designer Kiki Van Eijk’s four-story Buoyed sculptures.

The Coachella Valley’s own Cristopher Cichocki’s Circular Dimensions x Microscope is altogether more ambitious, comprising a shimmering pavilion of 25,000 feet of PVC tubes; its tunnels broadcast industrial soundscapes and lead to a lab for video art. The blend of creation and recreation finds similar form in Architensions’ dichroic-steel landscape, The Playground, a postmodern tower block that looks as good in theory as it will in the background of thousands of selfies.

Hans Christian Andersen, the prolific author of beloved fairy tales Thumbelina, The Ugly Duckling, and The Little Mermaid, reigns as the Danish city of Odense’s most famous resident. His legacy will become further enshrined there thanks to an ambitious new museum, called H.C. Andersen’s House and billed as one of the largest in Denmark, in which visitors can fully immerse themselves in his life and work through a fantastical setting that forgoes the biographic for the experiential. After a soft launch in June, the long-awaited museum has finally opened to the public.

The new museum is tucked behind the author’s birthplace, a quaint yellow corner house that has played host to the H.C. Andersen House museum since 1908. The Japanese architect Kengo Kuma was enlisted for the expansion, notably beating out a number of Scandinavian firms such as Bjarke Ingels Group and Snøhetta. Kuma built a timber-framed entrance that mimics Odense’s historic gabled houses and the “puzzlement, imagination, and magical adventure” of Andersen’s fairy tales.

David Rockwell has another Broadway hit on his hands. No surprise there: the architect and designer has amassed six Tony Award nominations—winning one—over a storied career that has seen his name appear in nearly 70 playbills, while also leading his prolific firm Rockwell Group known the world over for envisioning narrative-driven hospitality and culture spaces. But never before has he achieved a simultaneous triple-threat feat of design like this. The Rockwell-designed “Take Me Out” is a smash hit on Broadway. It’s running at the Rockwell-designed Hayes Theater. Just a few blocks away is the just-opened Rockwell-designed Broadway paean of a hotel, Civilian.

Taking its stance with instant confidence on the streets of Hell’s Kitchen, the 203-room Civilian is not just a hotel amid the Theater District; it is a distinctly theatrical hotel, one that demonstrates a love for the stage in a celebration of the energy, history, and future of Broadway as nothing in New York has ever done. Upon entering, one has the sense that you’ve arrived as a special guest backstage. From a curtain-draped circular stair for very grand entrances to vintage lobby seating sourced from a historic Buffalo theater, this isn’t lowbrow “jukebox” Broadway; it’s an homage to the Manhattan experience of great theater and design as can only be found in the breathing fantasy of Rockwell’s New York.

Reach the design world every morning. Find out more about advertising in the Design Dispatch.

ALMA is a two-year old boutique, Brooklyn-based PR agency operating at the intersection of contemporary art, fashion, beauty, and social justice. ALMA’s roster currently includes clients such as Bernard Lumpkin, Nicola Vassell Gallery, PATRON Gallery, Prestel Publishing, Roberts Projects Gallery and worthless studios. Founded by Hannah Gottlieb-Graham, ALMA is inspired by her mother and seeks to spearhead exciting opportunities for artists and institutions bringing soul to everything they do.

RTiiiKA is making “queer condoms” that are perfectly suited for gender-free genitals.

We wouldn’t be surprised if this expressive robot head began haunting our nightmares.

NASA sends a surgeon to outer space using a new technology called “holoportation.”

These new electric chopsticks trick people’s taste buds into thinking their meal is salty.