Rockport City Hall
Rockport, Texas
Following the devastation of Hurricane Harvey, Architexas partnered with PGAL, Inc. to design a new city hall for the City of Rockport. The building is currently under construction and will house administrative and municipal government offices as well as the municipal court. The City Hall is part of a larger landscaped plaza project that will contain the new Aransas County Courthouse and a Community Building, also designed by Architexas and PGAL. The plaza is envisioned as a vibrant new public space for downtown Rockport.
Architexas was involved in all early phases of project programming and plaza schematic design and our primary scope of services was design of the building exterior. The site’s location within the Rockport Heritage District Overlay Zone required careful consideration of materials and architectural style to meet design requirements in the Rockport Heritage District. The resulting design marries traditional architectural forms with the building’s modern function. A corner tower anchors the building in the plaza, arcades line the prominent north and east facades, and exterior walls are composed of a rich mixture of shellcrete cast stone, brick, and stucco with tile accents. Cast shellcrete blocks were chosen as the material to be used on the base of the building because it is a unique historic material developed for use on regional buildings, including the 1889 Aransas County Courthouse designed by J. Riley Gordon. Shellcrete is a concrete-like building material with oyster shell aggregate and was the basis of a widespread masonry material developed in the Aransas-Copano Bay region of the Texas Coast Bend during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Construction is expected to be completed in the winter of 2024.
