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 during 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 centre.^[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 Barbarie...

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]