AJ8 (2016) was a later project that built on the successful engagement of the Building Movements projects with air and patterning, as well as the questions raised through our experimental reflective writing project. These techniques and ideas were transposed into a dialogue with one of the basement spaces in the RMIT Design Hub building at a larger scale. An inflatable replica of the room in which it was housed, this smaller, softer lecture theatre took the surrounding interior volume, reduced it by half across the X and Y axes, rotated it by 90° and then flipped it upside-down. This inflatable lecture room was 10m long by 6.5m wide, with a raking floor that mirrored the sloping ceiling of the main space.

Crucially, the grid of black dots was replicated at the same size and scale as the surrounding environment, and the reorientation and doubling of spaces created an optical effect of vortex-like spirals in the misalignment of patternings where the rigid language of the building came into dialogue with the soft inflatable skin – a sort of talking over the top of each other. AJ8 took the language of the Design Hub and ‘rephrased’ it, disrupting its more regular rhythms. In doing so, the project emerged as something that is almost of the same architecture, but with a strangeness or excessiveness that distinguishes it from, and points back to, the quirks of the surrounding environment.

Working between the ‘languages’ of our projects and the environments that inform them begins to address Bennett’s questions regarding the “communicative energies” between a diverse array of actants. As discussed in relation to the Building Movements projects, Lefebvre’s techniques of rhythmanalysis also offer valuable ways in which we can “enhance our receptivity for ‘propositions’ not expressed in words”. In doing so, we necessarily take some of our sense of self out of the equation – our authorial voice becomes diffused amongst these other actants. Rather than imposing ourselves against the current of other materials, forces and environments, we let ourselves go with the flow of the project, becoming more thing-like in our engagements and interactions. Creative practice offers an ideal vehicle for this process of becoming thing-like, particularly when understood as a material dialogue. As Donald Schön describes, processes of creation can already be regarded “as a conversation with the materials of the situation”.⁠

AJ8 was the culmination of a longer series of projects that developed an approach to creative practice that I term ‘architectural judo’. This approach appropriates the Japanese martial arts practice and imagines what might happen if its concepts and techniques were put to work in understanding the dynamics of creative practice research in relation to architectural spaces. Literally translated, ‘judo’ means ‘gentle way’; it is not a practice of aggression or the forceful imposition of will. In judo, a practitioner works to amplify the forces of the other in order to destabilise them. If your opponent goes to push you, you pull them. Working with leverage, the objective is to use the force and weight of the other to throw them off balance.⁠ The practice of architectural judo proceeds by identifying and working with the forces, energies and movements that constitute an environment, modulating and amplifying their effects before discordantly feeding them back into the environment such that the qualities of their encounter are disrupted and reshaped. By working from within an unfolding situation, architectural judo offers techniques for a conversational approach to creative practice, with the potential to increase tentativeness through a dialogue between forces in dynamic relation.