Tell Me Everything

This poem by RD Laing reminds me of the daily experience of studying architecture. For a few years I baked bread daily. Pounds and pounds of dough and failed experiments. When I needed new ideas I could write to the best and they’d share, ideas, techniques, goals, everything.

See, bread is deceptively simple, it’s “just flour, water, and air”, but it humbles you quick. Architecture is impossibly complicated so it might take you decades to admit you don’t know anything.

RD Laing - Knots 1970

There is something I don’t know that I am supposed to know. I don’t know what it is I don’t know, and yet am supposed to know, and I feel I look stupid if I seem both not to know it and not know what it is I don’t know.

Therefore I pretend to know everything.

I feel you know what I am supposed to know but you can’t tell me what it is because you don’t know that I don’t know what it is.

You may know what I don’t know, but not that I don’t know it, and I can’t tell you. So you will have to tell me everything.

Politecnico di Milano, Italy