A native New Yorker, architect Claude Stoller witnessed Modern­ism’s ascent in North America firsthand, interacting with the movement’s leading players and later designing works that exemplified its principles. His architecture was imbued with a site sensitivity rooted in the universality of Modernist ideals. He died on May 16, 2023, at 101.

His formative years exposed him to pioneering pedagogy through summers spent at the Stelton Modern School in Piscataway Township, New Jersey. One of his first encounters with architectural modernity was as a 17-year-old assistant to his older brother, Ezra Stoller, renowned architectural photographer, for the shooting of Alvar Aalto’s Finnish Pavil­­ion at the 1939 World’s Fair. In that role, he would be present for the photographing of the Gamble House in Pasadena, California, by the Greene brothers, the Koch House in Cambridge, Massachusetts, by Carl Koch, and Taliesin West in 1945, among others. Of that last encounter, Stoller remembered the words Frank Lloyd Wright uttered when showing newly arrived slides of his Imperial Hotel in Tokyo to Ezra and him: “Where in all of Europe can you see such richness?”