Joseph Allen Hoover Professional Building

After moving to Texas City from the east Texas town of Marshall in the mid-1960s, Hoover established himself as the most distinguished architect to practice on the Galveston County mainland during the last three and a half decades of the twentieth century. The professional studio he and his partner at the time, Morgan, designed is a marvel of economy and ingenuity. It consists of three Hanover Modular Homes frames of welded steel pipe framing raised above grade and cantilevered from piers. The flat-roofed pavilion units are faced with insulated cement panels and sheets of bronze solar glass to articulate the studio's four-foot structural module. Set beneath mature trees on a former house site two blocks off the main street, Hoover's office is as trim, precise, and modern in the twenty-first century as when first completed.