Arrant Industries is the collected enquiry of Duncan Blackmore, and conceptual parent company to other enterprises.
It contains projects of various scales and manifestations, which often start with a recognition that ownership determines control, an instinct about culture or power imbalance and a desire to understand a place, cultivate productive tension or apply pressure to the systems which limit us. Projects with urban form often present a public face to the city and consciously negotiate around issues of agency and responsibility in the collective social institution of our ground floor urban space. Those without urban form similarly explore inefficiencies and ambiguities at the edges of the institutional domain.
Persistent interests in the work include (in no particular order) value, economy, accumulation, aggregation, care, re-use, non-determinism, determinism, idiosyncrasy, intensity, time, history, decoration, taste, labour, collaboration and the outer limits of the planning system.
Material Deposits is a thread of the work which embeds existing materials into new projects in ways which create moments of layering, recognition, reinterpretation and connection.
Alongside these explicitly experimental projects sits Arrant Land, a small sites development company which explores the potential for a progressive and engaged design and planning process to unlock commercially viable development, and for small scale development to positively engage with the dynamics of or our towns and cities and the complex systems which shape them.
Neighbourhood is the vehicle through which, together with others, broader strategic ideas and impacts for the built environment are pursued.
