Shepley Bulfinch > People > Peter J. Schlosser
I first became aware of architecture as an art form that I was interested in pursuing when I was in my teens and had the opportunity to experience Eero Saarinen's TWA Terminal at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York. Flying out of that terminal for a summer vacation, I was awestruck by the beauty of the building, both externally as a formal sculptural object - a bird - and internally as a space whose enclosure appeared to gracefully hover above. The notion that a building could be functional and at the same time carry a metaphorical message - in this case celebrating the wonder of flight - was a fascinating new experience for me.
As I began to study architecture, and particularly the work of early Modernists including Le Corbusier, Mies Van der Rohe, Eero Saarinen and Louis Kahn, I was particularly inspired by their mastery of the tectonics of engineering and materials sciences in the development of new systems and approaches to creating buildings and spaces in ways that had not been envisioned before.
I am passionate about working on projects that have a high level of complexity and that require the synthesis of the client's operational and functional challenges, the contextual limitations and opportunities of site, the aspirations of environment and space, and the development of technical strategies and systems to enable these often divergent goals to become realized in the final design. When successful, we create buildings that are appropriate, useful, enduring, and beautiful.