Lesley Bain FAIA

Lesley Bain FAIA (Bachelor of Arts in Urban Design, Yale; MArch 1988 University of Pennsylvania) has transformed Seattle’s public realm through design projects, legislative tools, and community advocacy.  She brings these lessons learned to a national audience, focusing on the enormous untapped potential of the STREET as a public space.
A passionate and successful advocate for urban life, Lesley has found in her native Seattle a fertile laboratory to influence new models of urban life and provide the kind of leadership increasingly needed from the architectural community.  The palette of opportunity runs from working with communities to transformation of the small nooks of neighborhoods and alleys to working with city and state agencies on bold moves of new urban infrastructure.  Her work includes award-winning mixed-use architecture that breathes life into the edges of the public realm, and brings the activities of street life into and through their sites.  She has written public policies, guidelines, and master plans that put the public realm at the heart of design.  Lesley recognized that the right-of-way offers a critical and under-recognized resource for transforming cities into desirable, walkable, and sustainable places to live.  Her projects, her writing, and her speaking help designers, elected officials, city staff, and communities to discover the opportunities of the street as public space, and raise the quality of urban life.
A major US city has relied on Lesley to lead the urban design for integrating the most challenging infrastructure projects into the city as assets for the public realm.  Local and state agencies have relied on Lesley for many of the challenging urban design problems of the last decade.  She took on the politically charged North Waterfront Access project in order to clear the way for the Seattle Art Museum's Sculpture Park.  The City of Seattle contracted with Lesley to lead the urban design for the very challenging task of integrating a 14-mile monorail planned for Seattle's downtown and urban neighborhoods.  In 2010, the Washington State Department of Transportation asked Lesley to oversee the urban design of a $4 billion infrastructure project that redefines neighborhoods at the south and north portals of a new tunnel below the city.  This work earned her invitations as a national expert to review and influence major infrastructure projects throughout the US, via the American Architecture Foundation's Sustainable Cities Academy.

Lesley authored the Citywide Design Guidelines for City of Seattle, which focus on the public realm and will influence the design of most private development for years to come.  She led the formulation of the first street master plan for Seattle, making the most pedestrian-friendly street possible at the heart of the burgeoning South Lake Union neighborhood.

Lesley worked with Weinstein AU in Seattle 1996-2013 before establishing Framework.

References:
*BWAF Archive:  Lesley Bain
*Lesley Bain with Barbara Gray & Dave Rodgers, Living Streets:  Strategies for Crafting Public Space (Wiley 2012)
*William J.  Bain Jr. (architect/father of Lesley Bain)