HENSON, Harold Gordon (1891-1958) of Toronto, Ont. devoted much of his career to teaching architecture and architectural drafting to students at Central Technical School, but he appears to have accepted private commissions for residential and commercial projects from 1925 onward. Henson was born in Winnipeg, Man. on 31 December 1891 and received his initial training as a junior draftsman in the Winnipeg office of Pratt & Ross, and in the Lethbridge office of James A. MacDonald in 1910-11. He was persuaded to study architecture in Montreal, and he graduated from the School of Architecture at McGill University in 1915. While enrolled there, he worked as an assistant for Brown & Vallance, a leading firm in that city, in 1911 and 1912, and later moved to Toronto to join the local office Thomas W. Lamb of New York City in 1919-20. In 1921 he became a junior architect in the architectural department of the Toronto Board of Education, but left Canada in early 1923 and moved to New York to work as a job captain and staff architect in the office of Holmes & Winslow, Architects. In 1925 he returned to Toronto to rejoin the Board of Education, but this time as a teacher and lecturer in architecture at Central Technical School, and he remained there for the duration of his career.
His training in Montreal and New York City provided him with early exposure to the evolving modernist style, and he explored many of these ideas in his residential commissions. Only one of these works, the Merriman Residence in Kingston, Ont. (1934) has been identified. Henson joined the Ontario Association of Architects in September 1931, and later died in Oakville, Ont. on 20 December 1958 (death notice Globe & Mail [Toronto], 23 Dec. 1958, 24; inf. Ontario Assoc. of Architects)
KINGSTON, ONT., residence for Mr. Merriman, Frontenac Street, 1934 (J. McKendry, Modern Architecture in Kingston, 2014, 39, illus. & descrip.; and J. McKendry, Architects Working in the Kingston Region 1920-2000, pub. 2023, 54, illus.