Reima Pietilä

Reima Pietila worked for the city of Helsinki for a short time before winning the 1957 competition for the Finnish Pavilion at the Brussels World Fair. In 1960 he set up a practice with his wife, Raili Pietila. Distancing himself from the more rational studies of his Finnish contemporaries, Pietila concentrated on an exploration of the "form of form". This led to a series of complex, impressionistic, free-form designs.  Pietila's theoretic isolation from architects within Finland, led him to work abroad. Much of this international work influenced his later Finnish projects. Always questioning the relationship between architectural theory and practice, Pietila established a discipline for his development of form. A professor of Architecture at Oulu University between 1973-79, Pietila ceased teaching to concentrate on design. Pietila represents a clear lineage from Alvar Aalto and Lars Sonck yet he diverged to produce a regionally relevant architecture of international significance.