Henry J. Steinbomer drawings

Henry J. Steinbomer (1902-1964) was considered the most prolific church architect in Texas during the 1940s and 1950s. In his early years, Steinbomer designed several fine residential projects and began his lifelong dedication to historic preservation; the ecclesiastical projects for which he was best known were designed later in his career.

Steinbomer was born in San Antonio; he graduated from the University of Texas in 1923 and worked for a year in New York, before returning to San Antonio to work in the offices of Ralph Cameron and Atlee B. Ayres. He was in partnership with Ellis F. Albaugh in 1928, then began a solo practice (usually with a staff of four or six) until the appointment of Jack L. Duffin as associate in the late 1950s. Steinbomer was a charter member of the Texas Society of Architects.

Steinbomer wrote early essays on the inherent climatic and stylistic advantages of the traditional building types found in Fredericksburg and Castroville. He was a co-founder of the Historic Buildings Foundation, a precursor of today's preservation groups in San Antonio, and he was active with sculptor Gutzon Borglum and arts patron Clara Driscoll in persuading the San Antonio City Council to protect the buildings and grounds of the Alamo.

During the Depression, Steinbomer worked in the Civilian Conservation Corps marker program and the Historic American Buildings Survey, while maintaining a limited private practice. His many residential projects from this period include houses for the Mayor of Laredo and for San Antonio engineer Frank Drought. His continued interest in preservation included reconstruction, with Fred Buenz and Bartlett Cocke, of several endangered historic houses now on the grounds of the Witte Museum in San Antonio. He worked on several additions and remodeling projects for the museum in the 1950s.

Other commercial projects in his career include renovations of the St. Anthony Hotel in San Antonio, small office buildings, studio complexes, and student unions in Austin and College Station.

Steinbomer's first church project was an interior remodeling of the Post Chapel at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio in 1940. This was followed in 1941 by an education building for San Antonio's Alamo Heights Methodist Church, for whom he designed a chapel and further additions over the next 20 years.

In the two decades between World War II and his death in 1964, Steinbomer produced over 150 church projects in Texas. There were scattered individual projects in Missouri and in Mexico, as well as an occasional synagogue or Roman Catholic church -- Sacred Heart Cathedral in San Angelo, for example -- but the majority of his work was in designing protestant churches up and down the Rio Grande Valley from Brackettville to Brownsville, and from Lubbock, Midland, and Ozona to Victoria and Corpus Christi. There were at least 75 church projects in San Antonio alone.

His early churches were in the Romanesque Revival style, showing the influence of Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue and of his own Beaux Arts training. In the 1950s he embraced the modern style of the Bauhaus masters, although he was known to hold in disdain the late work of Le Corbusier, as shown in the Pilgrimage Church at Ronchamps.

Steinbomer worked partly out of dedication to his faith, and he was proud of each of his designs, although among his favorites were St. Luke's Episcopal and Jefferson Methodist in San Antonio, the Church of the Good Shepard and Tarrytown Methodist in Austin, Parkdale Baptist Church in Corpus Christi, and First Presbyterian Church in Midland.

-Robert Steinbomer

-From "Texas 50." Texas Architect (Nov./Dec. 1989): p. 72.