Pedro Duarte Bento
An architect who has passed through some of the best practices in Europe and the United States, Pedro Duarte Bento is also a photographer fascinated by boats and a relentless wanderer with pen and paper always to hand.
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At the point when the interview turns into a long conversation complete with cups of coffee, cigarettes and sparkling water, thanks to the subject’s natural storytelling instinct, Pedro Duarte Bento affirms as candidly as a boy who hasn’t yet discovered mischief: “I don’t really cultivate my solitary side”.
This, coming from a man whose obsession with travelling, boats and photography once left him at death’s door in a backwater in India, sounds rather amusing. Even more so if you consider that this architect, whether or not he is travelling, likes to dedicate himself to writing, that most solitary of arts, which results in small aphorisms published on his blog (www.vontade-indomita.blogspot), a favourite among many Portuguese intellectuals.
You only need to read two or three of his meticulous posts to understand that this man of gentlemanly gestures, born in Évora in 1976, has very clear aesthetic tastes: as well as photography and boats, we discuss men versus women, crumbling buildings, film noir, detective novels, and the American suburban landscape. This is supposedly the profile of a loner, cultivated or otherwise.
His solitariness is knowing; it is the sine que non for being permanently on the road. In Pedro Duarte Bento’s case, and in view of his profession, I assume that he began travelling to see the classic pieces of architecture that man has constructed over the centuries. But no: his love of travelling started in a more prosaic fashion and cost him some broken teeth and a lot of bruises.
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“I started travelling a lot while playing rugby, because I got to the national team when I was 15, and stayed until I was 22”, he reveals, slightly embarrassed that his travel bug does not have a more romantic origin. He is a tall, broad-shouldered, well-formed man, who stood out aged 12 at Évora Rugby Club, playing wing and number eight, the last forward”. In other words: “I was one of the guys who went into battle”- which is why he lost two teeth, and gained the urge to see the world.
At the beginning, and contrary to the norm for great travellers, he started discovering the world “in a group setting”. With the team he went to Lyon, Toulouse and Argens in France, Merry Hill and Stratford-upon-Avon in England, Pontevedra in Spain, and Bucharest for the world junior championship. Going with a team meant few opportunities for adventure, but the trip to Bucharest was different and changed him for good.
“I arrived in Bucharest during the post-Ceausescu period: you felt the place opening up”. With one or two teammates they made “incursions into the black market”, where he bought “products that were still banned in Romania, simple things like Nirvana CDs and Lucky Strike cigarettes”. In some ways it was an ‘initiation’: Pedro discovered while still a teenager in the chaos of a country in revolution, “a world other than that of socially stable Europe”. And with this came “the moment when I wanted to travel with fewer people and discovered that my friends weren’t that way inclined. If I didn’t travel on my own, I wouldn’t go anywhere”.
Walking the earth
Pedro spent his degree working in architects’ offices, so that all the money he earned was “spent on trips with girlfriends”. He did the usual destination, to India and Morocco, a country for which gained a certain passion, getting to know the architecture of Chefchouan, Fez and Marrakech well. Then his horizons broadened, and he was always looking for ancient architecture, to frame the perfect photograph. In 2004 he crossed Mexico for a month, a trip “with a backpack, on local buses, the ones loaded down with cabbages and animals” or hitched rides on lorries with farm workers. Mexico stunned him, particularly thanks to the opportunity of coming face to face with “Mayan, Aztec, Toltec, Olmec and Zapotec architecture”. He fell in love with the ‘little hidden-away towns’ as well.
During these years the “great motivation for these trips was adventure: having a outward ticket, one to get back, and in between lose myself and get by”. But with time personal obsessions began to be take over. “I have a fetish for boat-building”, he says, to explain that while in Mexico, he went to “two places no-one else would dream of going”: Puerto Progreso and Salina Cruz. They are “industrial cities with connections to the sea and Puerto Progreso had a shipyard” he visited “to take some pictures”.
So began work-inspired trips. A few years later he got a “study grant from the Fundação Oriente to photograph the ship-breaking industry in India and Bangladesh”. Ship-breaking “is a where they take apart big boats; container ships, oil-tankers and aircraft-carriers”. It used to be done in every developed country but “in the mid-80s they decided it was harmful, because it released toxic wastes which put workers at risk”. The industrialized countries “transferred the practice to developing countries, because 95% of a ship’s parts are recyclable.”
The grant allowed him to go to two places with few tourists: Alang in India and Chittagong in Bangladesh. There are “miles of coast with beaches full of hundreds of men with blowtorches and hammers dismantling ships”.
In Alang he was barred by the local authority, and then he got ill “from contaminated food”. Alang “is the most isolated place in existence” and Duarte Bento got into trouble. That night he slept “in a roadside hotel that turned out to be a brothel”. The next day he went to Ahmedabad, “the nearest airport, in a rickshaw taxi with a raging fever”. Then on to Goa, “where the Fundação Oriente has a delegation”. The Foundation’s doctor took him to hospital. “I blacked out and was on a drip for four days. I don’t remember anything. I convalesced on Palolem beach”. He could have given up on the project, but as soon as he recovered he was back on the road: “I went from Mumbai to Dhaka, capital of Bangladesh. In Chittagong I finally assembled the portfolio”.
When he got home, he decided, paradoxically, that “it was time to live abroad”. In Portugal, at the time, he had designed the Alfândega restaurant in Lisbon, and a house in the Alentejo. He sent a portfolio to architects MAP, run by Jose Luis Mateo in Barcelona. “I was there a year. Life was relaxed, I had foreign friends, I lived in a cosmopolitan area in a bohemian atmosphere, I travelled.”
Then he started “thinking about New York, where I had been a few years earlier”. He decided “to go there to find work and adventure”. With a bit of money he had saved he lived for three months in Harlem, doing nothing except visiting museums. He got work at SOM. “It was on Wall Street, the opposite of those bohemian places that always interested me.”
Even with a steady job in the city, the urge to explore was so strong that Duarte Bento couldn’t settle for long in one place. In New York he lived on the Upper West Side and in East Village. Then he took off his work clothes (“I didn’t like the suit and tie”), made a trip to Nashville “in Chinese trucks”, returned, spent “two nights in a park” looking for a new house, until he found “a Chinese boarding house” where he stayed a month, before settling in Williamsburg.
Then it was back to Lisbon, where he sells contemporary photography and does freelance architecture. In March 2009 he exhibited his photos at the Pedro Serrano Gallery, a collection “dedicated to suburban North-American identity”. Meanwhile he went off to Ireland, came back, put on a workshop and was off again. Always on the move, faithful to the saying he came across a few years ago: “Travelling is not a luxury, travelling alone is”.
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by João Bonifácio
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