His father, Frans Viktor Pietilä, was a property owner and his mother, Ida Maria Lehtinen was a housewife.

This was followed by two other significant competition victories, the Kaleva Church in Tampere (1966) and the Dipoli Student Union building for Helsinki University of Technology (1966).

The life and career of Reima Pietilä has been well charted in the writings of British architectural historian-critics Roger Connah and Malcolm Quantrill, and to some extent also by the Norwegian architect, theorist and historian Christian Norberg-Schulz.

The whole question is problematic, however, because Finland's most famous architect, Alvar Aalto, was also seen as someone who broke the mold of pure modernism, someone who indeed talked about extending the notion of rationalism.

He was very much concerned with the issue of a phenomenology of place, epitomised by the Student Union building Dipoli (1961–1966) on the Otaniemi campus of Helsinki University of Technology.

The famous summer cottage[2] of Tove Jansson and Tuulikki Pietilä is situated on the remote archipelago island of Klovharu.