Question: How long does it normally take to design a structure start to finish?

Emma Bradley answered on 11 Mar 2016:

So it depends on the structure. A house you could do in a few months; stations like mine take years.

It is all down to how large something is, and how many nasty details have to be sorted out with other people. For example, in a house you might have to talk to the utility companies and the council and the neighbours to make sure they agree with the bits of the design that affect them. For a station you have all of those but on a huge scale, plus you will have to talk to the other designers designing the things that go in the station, such as the tracks that run through, and the huge amounts of ventilation equipment to pump air through the tunnels. You want to get as many things right as possible at the design stage because once they start building it, it costs a lot more to change things!