the designer sat at his drafting board

My brother is visiting, and, as due to late flight arrangements he's using SFO instead of SJC, he's for the first time staying at a hotel up in that direction. This turned out to lie in a wilderness of shopping center, somewhere between San Mateo and Foster City. After I successfully but by blind faith in the instructions got him there, I took a look at a map, and concluded that the whole neighborhood must have been designed and laid out by a city planner punch-drunk with power, especially with what he could do with freeway entrances and exits. Reminded me of Jordin Kare's fictional engineering-machine designer:

And just to make a machinist squeal
I'll have him machine it from tungsten steel.