Hubert Tonka

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Hubert Tonka
Born1943
NationalityFrench
OccupationSociologist
Known forUtopie magazine

Hubert Tonka (born 1943) is a French sociologist and urban planner who edited the Utopie magazine, and was one of the leaders of the Utopie movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s. [1]

Contents

Career

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.

Views

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]

Selected bibliography

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References

Citations
  1. 1 2 Utopia Deferred.
  2. ↑ Colomina 2010, p. 197.
  3. ↑ Harris & Berke 2011, p. 34.
  4. ↑ Stanek 2011, p. 24.
  5. 1 2 Dessauce 1999, p. 52.
  6. ↑ Colomina 2010, p. 100.
  7. ↑ Damamme 2008, p. 228.
  8. ↑ Genosko 1994, p. 166.
  9. ↑ Colomina 2010, p. 352.
  10. ↑ Stewart 2011, p. 2.
  11. ↑ La Librairie Dialogues.
  12. ↑ Dessauce 1999, p. 38.
  13. ↑ Dessauce 1999, p. 41.
  14. ↑ Stanek 2011, p. 245.
Sources
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