Shannon Bassett
Shannon Bassett is currently Assistant Professor of Architecture and Urbanism. She has taught both advanced architecture and urban design studios, as well as beginning design. She also developed and taught the seminar, Architecture and Urbanism in Modern China, both in Tampa and in Beijing. She has run the USF SACD China Summer Studies Abroad Studio in Beijing and Shanghai. She is currently teaching the design seminar course, “Urban Architecture and Landscapes”, which will design a scheme for the Bradenton Riverwalk in collaboration with Realize Bradenton. Bassett has lectured internationally including in Beijing, China in the fall of 2006 at the International Forum on Sustainable Urbanism Conference (IFoU) organized by the Berlage and held at the Tsinghua School of Architecture, as well as at the China Planning Network week Urbanization Summit organized by MIT. She delivered two papers at this year’s conference in Delft as part of the IFOU conference, “The New Urban Question”, both on sustainable urbanism and infrastructural urbanism in China. Her writing has been published in prominent journals and magazines, including Topos International Review of Landscape Architecture and Urban Design and Canadian Architect. She holds a Masters of Architecture in Urban Design from the Harvard Graduate School of Design. Her urban design work from the Harvard GSD has been included in the following publications: New Orleans: Strategies for a City in a Soft Land (edited by J. Busquets, 2005) and Two Squares (edited by Hashim Sarkis, 2006) She worked with five other students and Rem Koolhaas on “Utopia?” a facet of the Harvard Project on the City looking at visionary Soviet Urbanism before the collapse of communism in the former Soviet Union, which planned for an exhibit around the collection of MUAR (Museum of Architecture Moscow) on the subject.
She is currently one of three faculty members designing and launching a new urban design program for the School of Architecture and Community Design in Fall 2010, with one of the program’s focus on landscape and ecology as urbanism in the immediate Tampa Bay area. The launching of the new Urban Design program has at its core in collaboration with the Florida Center, a program that has part of its focus on landscape and ecology as urbanism with a current significant focus on water management. Her research includes researching and developing a possible alternative approach to the current development strategies currently occurring in Tampa and China. She is currently working on a book proposal: “Contemporary Infrastructural Urbanism and Landscape Works in China”.