Ron Henderson | Principal | FASLA
Ron Henderson a landscape architect and educator. He is founding principal of Lirio Landscape Architecture. Recent award-winning projects include the Gardens of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum (Boston, Massachusetts), City Walk (Providence, Rhode Island), Memorial to the Abolition of Slavery (Nantes, France), and Jiuzhou Qingyan roof garden of the Chinese Pavilion at the Shanghai World Expo in 2010 (China).
Lirio has been recognized with over 30 international, national, and regional awards for design, planning, preservation, and research. Most recently, he is landscape architect for the grounds of the Elizabethan Theater at Chateau d'Hardelot (Condette, France) which was nominated for the 2017 European Union Urban Prize - Mies van der Rohe Award and received World Architecture News' Best Wood Building of the Year.
He is Professor and Director of the Master of Landscape Architecture + Urbanism Program at Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) in Chicago. There, he is a prime investigator on "The Driverless City Project," a multi-disciplinary research initiative funded by the National Science Foundation and the Nayar Prize, which investigates the urban design implications of driverless vehicles. Additional research investigates "Long and Narrow" urban landscape projects. He held prior academic appointments at Harvard University, Pennsylvania State University, Tsinghua University, Roger Williams University, and Rhode Island School of Design.
At IIT, he is the inaugural Director of Research for the Alphawood Arboretum and was academic advisor for the student-led initiative that established the arboretum and inspired $2.6m in philanthropy. He authored the accreditation application and leads a botanical and horticultural research collaborations with neighborhood, regional, and national organizations.
He is a Fellow of the American Society of Landscape Architects, a US-Japan Friendship Commission Creative Artist Fellow, a National Park Service Artist-in-Residence, and a Senior Fellow of Garden and Landscape Studies at Dumbarton Oaks. He has lectured widely in North America, Europe, and Asia.
He is author of Analysis of the Traditional Chinese Garden (2014 co-translation from Chinese into English by SpringerNATURE of seminal book by PENG Yigang), 30 TREES (Birkhauser, 2024), The Gardens of Suzhou (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013) and many articles, book chapters, essays, and criticism on contemporary landscape architecture topics.