Reima Pietilä

Who was Reima Pietilä?

Reima Pietilä was a Finnish architect. He did most of his work together with his wife Raili Pietilä.

Reima Pietilä was professor of architecture at the University of Oulu from 1973 to 1979.

The life and career of Reima Pietilä has been well charted in the writings of British architectural historian-critics Roger Connah and Malcolm Quantrill, as well as Norwegian theorist and historian Christian Norberg-Schulz. Their basic question is to what extent Pietilä goes against the grain of a Finnish modernist architecture concerned with rationalism and economy. The whole question is problematic, however, because Finland's most famous architect, Alvar Aalto, was also seen as someone who broke the mould of pure modernism, someone who indeed talked about extending the notion of rationalism. Pietilä saw his work as organic architecture, but also very much modern. Pietilä intellectualised his position, and was well-read in philosophy. He was very much concerned with the issue of a phenomenology of place, epitomised by the Student Union building Dipoli at Helsinki University of Technology. This concern for place also extended to his concerns about national identity and Finnishness, even exploring the Finnish language to generate architectural form. The same then applied also for his works abroad, in Kuwait and Delhi.