Reima Pietilä (1923–1993) was a Finnish architect and theorist who did most of his work with his wife, Raili Pietilä; from 1963 all their buildings were credited to "Raili and Reima Pietilä". Born in Turku, where a school friend was the future president Mauno Koivisto, he graduated from the Helsinki University of Technology in 1953. His career took off when he won the competition for the Finnish Pavilion at the 1958 Brussels World's Fair. Widely read in philosophy and literature, he saw his work as organic and modern, wrote about the meaning of place, Finnish identity and even the Finnish language as a source of form.
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Two competition wins followed in 1966: the Kaleva Church in Tampere and Dipoli, the student union building at Otaniemi in Espoo, built of pine, copper and natural rock with 500 windows of which only four are the same. The Metso Library in Tampere (1986) and Lieksa Church (1982) came later, along with work in Kuwait and New Delhi. Mäntyniemi in Helsinki (1993), the presidential residence, was finished in the year of his death, and Koivisto was its first resident.
