Raili and Reima Pietilä: Challenging Modern Architecture

The Museo Colecciones ICO is ushering in its season with a show focusing on this Finnish husband-and-wife team of architects

In Madrid, the Museo Colecciones ICO (MUICO) and the Finnish Museum of Architecture of Helsinki will analyse the most noteworthy projects of Reima Pietilä and his wife Raili through a series of original sketches, photographic material, copies of drawings and descriptive texts.  To accompany them, until the 14^th of February 2010 MUICO will also be displaying construction blueprints that were never built, 16 scale models and a film, Estaciones. Cuatro recorridos a través de la arquitectura de Raili y Reima Pietilä (The Seasons: Four Journeys into Raili and Reima Pietilä’s Architecture), which studies the details of their output.

Reima Pietilä, who passed away in 1993, was a professor of architecture at the University of Oulu in the 1970s. His architectural oeuvre, which has been extensively studied by Malcolm Quantrill, Roger Connah and Christian Norberg-Schulz, is often described as organic, modern, intellectual and critical of the usual principles of contemporary Finnish architecture, rationalism and economy, partly through the influence of Alvar Aalto, with whom Reima worked.

One of Reima Pietilä’s most important works is the Dipoli Student Union building at the Helsinki University of Technology. This building bears witness to his concern that his buildings adapt to their site, a concern that was linked to his profound interest in philosophy and regard for the Finnish national identity. In other projects, he even tried to yield architectural forms based on his country’s language.

He also designed several government buildings in Kuwait, and between the 1960s and 1980s he won important commissions in Finland, where he incessantly strove to update his own individual vernacular. These assignments include the Kaleva Church, the Metso public library in Tampere and the official residence of the President of the Republic. After Reima’s death, his wife Raili and daughter Annukka donated the archive of his studio, which contained over 30,000 drawings, to the Finnish Museum of Architecture.

This exhibition, entitled “Raili and Reima Pietilä: Challenging Modern Architecture”, will be the first retrospective on this husband-and-wife team of architects in Spain. It will also be the first show that the Fundación ICO will unveil in his exhibition halls since it received the new MUICO brand name, launched with the purpose of fostering the dissemination of this institution’s cultural programming among Madrid residents and visitors.

Photo: Pietilä New Delhi. Embajada de Finlandia (exterior), Nueva Delhi, India, 1983-1985. Foto: Simo Rista/MFA

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