I like your style, cochramd.
A good way to get that rare, shiny Legendary Building Designer is this:
1) Get a large empty area: dump a whole whack of loose stone in the corner and then unforbid them.
2) Get everybody with masonry in a burrow that does not include this cleared room.
3) Designate the room full of 1-tile bridges, using the pile of loose stones.
4) When they are finished being designed, cancel them.
The masons, burrowed elsewhere, won't be able to work in the room to finish the bridges so cancelling them is instant. It's more efficient to clear all the stone away first to avoid cancellation spam, since the architect can't move a loose stone out of the way if it's been tasked already for another building.
It will take a while to get him to Legendary, but it's fairly low-maintenance to let him work away at the designs before you have to cancel, dump the stones back in the corner, and re-designate the bridges.
Oooooh, this sounds fun. I've got a lot of big open spaces with stone nearby, so I don't even have to bother with hauling first. I've also got 7 masons and nothing important to do with them at the moment, so I can skip the burrowing too. According to DT and my calculations, it should take him.....exactly 128 bridges (for most people it would've been 640, but I playrf with the raws to quintuple the gain and stop the rust of skills and attributes). I can do that without needing to redesignate. Sweet! Pity, though, that the "more experience comes from jobs with bigger stacks" thing doesn't apply to bridges, because that would make this much, much faster, both for me designating it all and her actually doing it.
I built another statue and trapline, but the aforementioned cave crocodile took no interest. This was particularly troubling, as the casting chamber was full and she was right by the inlet for one of the coolant injectors. I found a partial olm skeleton in the castign chamber not too long ago, so my grates aren't a 100% guarantee nothing important will get sucked in, and I couldn't risk losing her. She attacked my dwarfs earlier, so knowing that she was attracted to live bait I ordered that cage traps be built right up to the water's edge and low and behold after two scuffles, the first of which knocked her unconscious (fortunately she got nothing worse than bruises) she was captured. Once I knew she was safe, I let the coolant injection begin. Oh, and speaking of cave crocodiles, those eggs have hatched. Going to give them "the usual" (train them all up, let them reach adulthood and slaughter them if I haven't mastered cave crocodile training by then).
Got another artifact instrument:
Man, this has been one busy spring.