Hubert Tonka

For family reasons, Tonka had to start work at a very young age. In Paris around 1960 he was taking night classes for a diploma in urban planning while working in the day, where he met other members of what would become the Utopie group.[2] He worked as a plasterer in the day.[3] He became the assistant of Henri Lefebvre, who was a professor at the University of Paris's institute of urban planning.[4] He was an aesthete, and a refined typographer. By the end of 1966 he was a member of the editorial committee of Melp!, the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts student association's review, along with Jacques Barda, Roland Castro, Pierre Granveaud and Antoine Grumbach.[5] Melp! helped to articulate the dissatisfaction of students in the lead-up to the protests of 1968.[6] Tonka was co-founder of the Vincennes department of urbanism.[7]

The Utopie group originated from a meeting at Lefebvre's house in 1966. It included the architects Jean Aubert, Jean-Paul Jungmann and Antoine Stinco, the landscape architect Isabelle Auricoste (his wife) and the sociologists Jean Baudrillard, René Lourau and Catherine Cot.[1] Utopie, review de sociologie de l'urbain first appeared in May 1967, with Tonka as managing editor.[8] Tonka created L'Imprimerie Quotidienne, which printed the magazine.[9] Tonka edited and promoted collections of Baudrillard's essays, helping to draw the attention of the public to his views, which were at first Marxist but later moved towards the center.[10]

Tonka became a Director at the French Institute of Architecture (1987) and a Professor of architecture and contemporary art in Bordeaux and Angers (1994).[11] In the 1990s Tonka and singer, songwriter and author Jeanne-Marie Sens founded the publishing house Sens & Tonka. Tonka and Sens co-authored and published several books on architecture.

Tonka gave life to the Pneumatic concepts of the Utopie group, which advocated ephemeral, inflatable structures.[5] Tonka held extreme left opinions, close to the anarchists, that could be traced back to Rosa Luxemburg and Mikhail Bakunin.[12] Talking of the intellectual roots of the Utopie group, Tonka said:[13]

I have a whole culture which comes from Batavian Marxism, that is to say Anton Pannekoek and Herman Gorter, and it has nothing to do with French Marxism. I discovered this culture in working in the Institute of Social History in Amsterdam... I discovered "secrets" from Lefebvre, who did not want to widen that membership ... there was also Archigram, there was also the Situs [situationists], and then there was everything that was around and that we saw: there was Arguments, Socialisme ou Barbarre...

In a 1971 interview Tonka said "To imagine ... that it is possible to act politically through urbanism, architecture, and the detournement of either is a dream." He believed that only a revolution could change society, and this could only happen in spite of architecture, which is by definition repressive.[14]

Citations

Sources

• Colomina, Beatriz (2010). Clip, Stamp, Fold: The Radical Architecture of Little Magazines 196x 197x. ACTAR Publishers. ISBN 978-8496954526.
• Damamme, Dominique (2008). Mai-Juin 68. Editions de l'Atelier. ISBN 978-2708239760.
• Dessauce, Marc (1999). The Inflatable Moment: Pneumatics and Protest in '68. Princeton Architectural Press. ISBN 1568981767.
• Genosko, Gary (1994). Baudrillard and Signs: Signification Ablaze. Routledge. ISBN 0415112575.
• Harris, Steven; Berke, Deborah (2011). Architecture of the Everyday. Chronicle Books. ISBN 978-1616891206.
• "Hubert Tonka Biographie". La Librairie Dialogues. Retrieved 2012-05-21.
• Stanek, Lukasz (2011). Henri Lefebvre on Space: Architecture, Urban Research, and the Production of Theory. U of Minnesota Press. ISBN 978-0816666164.
• Stewart, Jon (2011). Kierkegaard's Influence on the Social Sciences. Ashgate Publishing, Ltd. ISBN 978-1409434900.
• "Utopia Deferred". The MIT Press. Archived from the original on 2012-01-29. Retrieved 2012-05-20.