Raili Paatelainen graduated in architecture from the Helsinki University of Technology in 1956, worked for the planner Olli Kivinen and for Olaf Küttner, and in 1960 founded an office with Reima Pietilä; they married in 1963. From that point every work of the practice was officially attributed to both of them, and in 1975 the office was renamed Raili and Reima Pietilä Architects. Together they produced the strangest and most inventive Finnish buildings of the postwar decades — Kaleva Church in Tampere, the Dipoli student union at Otaniemi, Hervanta's civic and congregational centre, Tampere's Metso library, and Mäntyniemi, the Finnish president's residence, which Raili carried to completion after Reima's death in 1993. Popular accounts still shorten the pair to his name alone.
