Finland's pavilion at the Brussels World Fair

Reima Pietilä, in his architectural poem ‘The criterion of possibility', poses “a moral question -/ what is architecture? / a political question - / what should architecture be ? / in practice the only possible form is that /which asks / what can architecture be ? "

Language was, for Pietilá, an important tool: he approached architecture simultaneously through image and through word. In Finnish -which does not bend itself easily to theoretical speculation - he developed some new architectural vocabulary.

Pietilá's perspective varied constantly; he sought new, uncharted areas in the field of architecture and was not satisfied with what had already been achieved and found to be good: "... true design ideas come from the ‘in-between zone '; between abstract and concrete things. There is a broad domain of creative metamorphosis in architecture still as yet unexploited by the pioneer generation or by ourselves. The future and any progress it holds is there."...[+]