He is regarded as the second-most influential railway architect in Norway, after Paul Due.
Hoel graduated from Kristiania Tekniske Skole (today Oslo University College) in 1896.
For six years he had various assistant jobs at architecture firms in Norway and Germany.
[2] In 1913, he was appointed director of the newly established NSB Arkitektkontor, an in-house division of the Norwegian State Railways.
His early works were mostly in historicism, but from the 1920s he started designing in neoclassicism.