Soft Progressivism: Salvaging Architecture’s Brutal Soft Power

The central, architectural, character of William Gibson’s Bridge Trilogy (1993-1999) – the post-apocalyptic bario colonizing the abandoned infrastructure of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge –gives form to the insecurities that drove the modernist project, staking claims on modern infrastructure’s assumption of control and finality, wresting its potential toward unforeseen ends. Using Gibson’s vision as a harbinger, Soft Progressivism reorients architecture’s soft power, reclaiming the brutal autonomy of the megastructure, in order to proliferate applications for reforming today’s over-determined and frequently abandoned infrastructural platforms. Freed of its urban bonds by the necessities of crisis, architecture obtains a collective program hitherto repressed.