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The jury for the 1987 UIA Gold Medal met in Paris on February 5 and 6, 1987, and awarded this distinction to Finnish architect Reima Pietila.
Tampere Library in Metso (1978-1985) Reima PIETILA architect.
The work of Reima Pietila is one of the gems of modern Finnish architecture. In addressing fundamental questions from a theoretical and practical point of view, and through both language and images, Pietila, impressive and pragmatic, has become an eminent personality in the realm of architecture.
Modern in its most essential aspect, his architecture provides a pertinent response to eternal questions concerning the relationship between man, nature, and shelter. For this reason, an analysis of Pietila's architectural theory and works enables one to simultaneously perceive the past, present, and future.
In his architectural and urban planning works, Pietila evaluates the site in a pragmatic manner, in its natural and social context. The result is realisations that are at the same time universal and extremely personal. If the typically Finnish landscape predominates in his designs, the effects of his approach are just as conclusive in his realisations in New Delhi, Kuwait, and Dubai.
It would be impossible to place Pietila's architecture in a pre-defined category of aesthetic adherence. It is rather in an intermediary zone, at the same time abstract and concrete, somewhere between imagination and reality, between vision and form.
"The morphology of expressive space" developed by Pietila, "is in the spiritual heritage of Ode Still" and its principal expression is the Finnish Pavilion created for the World's Fair in Brussels in 1958. In a similar way the Dipoli University Centre's scale, colours, and the utilisation of space invites one to compare it with the colours, scale, and topography of the site on which it was built. It is this search for communion with the natural environment that makes Reima Pietila a fundamentally Scandinavian architect.
Pietila profoundly examined the meaning of "region" in its architectural implications : he worked not only on the organic integration of his edifices into their environment, but also enriched the architectural vocabulary on an international level with idioms issuing from Finnish architecture, adapted to the Finnish context. His sense of regionalism also includes a historical dimension that is expressed in a remarkable fashion in the constructions facing the ocean that are a part of the Sief Palace in Kuwait, and in the thematic motifs in brick that adorn the public and commercial buildings situated on the central axe of the Hervanta residential district in Tampere.
For thirty years, Pietila's work followed a personal architectural path, never varying from the spirit proper to our era, always illustrating the idea that a creative metamorphosis in architecture is both indispensable and possible.