Critic's Notebook: Christopher Hawthorne on Unhappy Hipsters and the mystery behind it
So what if the name, for all its alliterative bounce, seems not quite
right? And who cares, really, if the quality has ebbed ever so slightly
in the last few days?
The website Unhappy Hipsters
is the most welcome addition to the often self-serious world of
architecture and design in recent memory, not to mention a pocket of
satirical warmth in the middle of a soggy, recessionary,
earthquake-wracked, Martha Coakley winter.
Produced anonymously
on a simple Tumblr blogging platform, it adds brief, deadpan captions
to photographs from Dwell magazine (and a few other publications), most
showing couples looking miserable or lonely in their spare, neo-modern
houses. Quite a few of the pictures feature some version of the same
basic tableau: a woman sits inside, often on the sofa, while a man
stands nearby gazing out the window, silently ruing his life or
plotting his escape -- or both.
Unhappy Hipsters entered the
world quietly near the end of January, doling out a couple of entries
per day, and soon began generating serious Web buzz. Its best captions
have a pared-down rhythm to match the architecture on display, along
with a forlornly superior air -- Colbert meets Sartre meets "This Is
Why You're Fat."
Beneath a photograph of a man and
woman in bed together -- he reading Bill Buford's "Heat" in paperback,
she with her eyes half-closed, a blue rotary phone on his bedside table
and a pink one on hers: "There are some things that can't be learned
from a book."
And under a picture of a man sitting at a dining
table, looking pleadingly at the camera, while behind him another male
figure can be seen -- through a latticed wooden screen -- walking up a
flight of stairs: "Everyone always leaves."
A few designers and
design writers have pointed out that the word "hipsters" in the title
strikes the wrong note, and I can't say I disagree: How many hipsters,
as the term is generally thrown around, can afford to commission a
house from Marmol Radziner or Jeanne Gang, whose work the site
features? Meanwhile, they are also busy taking bets -- via Twitter
(where @unhappyhipsters now has more than 5,000 followers), Facebook and e-mail -- on the identity of Unhappy Hipsters' creators.
Some
fans have read every little change to the stripped-down format like a
bunch of tea leaves. Did it mean something when the site began to
include photographs from magazines other than Dwell, including one from
(of all places) Portland Monthly?
And what about the decision to
start adding photo credits alongside the captions? I'm sure Dwell
photographers, or their lawyers, fired off some threatening
correspondence. But doesn't the whole DIY, guerrilla-satire thing lose
a little punch when you start worrying about doing the right thing?
When I e-mailed the address listed on the site, asking whether the authors wanted to reveal themselves, I got this reply:
"We'd
like to stay anonymous. But we can tell you this: Unhappy Hipsters is a
place to finally say what we've all been thinking: 'Oh, miserable
modernist -- you picked the concrete floors and the gravel yard; at
least pretend you like it.' "
Fair enough. I have my guesses, but I'll keep them to myself.
The
site's sudden popularity suggests that image-based satire is a form
particularly well-suited for the Web -- Unhappy Hipsters would work
beautifully on the iPad -- and that Twitter, with its unbending
140-character limit, may be sharpening our collective caption-writing
skills.
It can also be seen as a sign of the speed with which
the Web's viral phenomena wax and wane these days. It somehow seems
entirely reasonable to speak nostalgically of the site's early period,
all of a week ago, when it was sending its best work out into a
relative void.
Once the seal was broken on the Unhappy Hipsters
vacuum -- once the world noticed -- it was only a matter of time before
its crisp satire started to droop a little, as it has in the last few
days. The focus has also begun to drift away from residential
architecture, with the addition this week of a picture showing an
academic building at Caltech by Frederick Fisher & Partners.
That
seems odd: a kind of claustrophobia unique to domestic settings is what
gives Unhappy Hipsters much of its kick. In the site's world, the
transparency that modern architecture is known for turns every living
room into a fishbowl. Emotionally speaking, the open plan is an open
wound.
-- Times Architecture Critic Christopher Hawthorne