Claude Stoller

Claude Stoller (b.1921) was born in the Bronx, New York and attended The City of New York for a semester before joining his brother, Ezra Stoller, at Black Mountain College in 1938. Stoller pursued a general curriculum, but focused on art and architecture by studying with Josef Albers, Lawrence Kocher, Howard Dearstyne, and Lou Bernard Voigt. He developed his passion for photography, an art form which he still pursues to this day. During his time at Balck Mountain, Stoller and his fellow student, Charles Forberg, lead the construction of the Jalowetz House, whihc he designed by Lawrence Kocher for BMC musicologist and teacher Heinrich Jalowetz and his family. Stoller's education was enriched by this experience. Through the process, he learned the value of hands-on experience, the social issues surrounding architecture, the use of natural materials in architecture, and a variety of techniques for creating building materials, all of which informed his life-long career.

Interrupting his education at Black Mountain College, Stoller was drafted in 1942 and served in the 14th Coast Artillery on Puget Sound. He attended army engineering school, and in 1946, was accepted into Harvard's Graduate School of Design. After receiving his Masters in Architecture, Stoller traveled to Italy with his wife, Nan Oldenburg Stoller (now Nan Black), a fellow Black Mountain student, and continued to study at the University of Florence for a year. Before establishing his own architectural firms in San Francisco and then Berkeley, Stoller worked for architectural firms in Boston and taught at Washington University. In 1957, Stoller joined the faculty in the Department of Architecture at the University of California, was acting chairman in 1965-66, and served as Chair of Graduate Studies in the 1980s.

Stoller has recieved several awards and accommodations; he was a visiting architect at the National Design Institute in Ahmedabad, India (1963-64), an elected member of the College of Fellows of the American Institute of Architects (1968), and recipient of the Berkeley Citation by the University of California as he was retiring in 1991. Stoller's San Francisco-based firm, Marquis & Stoller, orchestrated several significant projects, including the San Francisco Zoo Primates Discovery Center, Sacramento Department of Justice Division Headquarters, and Robert F. Kennedy Library at California Polytechnic University. Stoller's second wife, Rosemarry Raymond Stoller, also a Black Mountain student, resides with the architect primarily in Berkeley and in Maine.