THE KINGDOME WAS TWO YEARS OLD, and had housed the Mariners for one season, when Esquire contributing editors Joan Kron and Suzanne Slesin published a coffee-table picture book, High Tech: The Industrial Design and Source Book for the Home.

Here’s what an out-of-print-books site says about it:

“High-tech is a term being used in architectural circles to describe an increasing number of residences and public buildings with a nuts-and-bolts-exposed-pipes technological look or to describe residences made of prefabricated components more commonly used to build warehouses or factories. The authors have expanded this definition to include a parallel trend in interior design-the use of commonplace commercial and industrial equipment in the home.”

The Kingdome was a high-tech design of the old school (before the trends discussed in the book). That is, it took a purely utilitarian approach to its purpose of housing entertainment.

It was a perfect symbolization of the Seattle civic zeitgeist circa 1976-77. In a town just a few generations removed from the frontier, and just six years removed from the massive Boeing bust, it was a monument to frugality and efficiency. It lacked not only the creature comforts of modern stadia but the basic aesthetic principles of a facility whose tenants had to compete for the public’s discretionary leisure spending.

But it was an engineering marvel, despite having been built to less-than-precision by the low bidder. Boeing, and its engineering mentality, still ruled the Seattle spirit back then.

That spirit adored the miracle of the thin concrete roof, of the whole nine-acre interior room built for only some $50 million. It marveled that our then-fair city could finally become A Big League Town, simply by turning some old railroad yards (on filled-in tide flats) into a just-adequate-enough home for baseball, football, basketball (for a couple years), soccer, evangelists, monster trucks, RV shows, and gift expos.

But, as they say, that was then.

Today, the Seattle civic zeitgeist is much better symbolized in the new Mariner park, Safeco Field.

The old ballpark was done on the cheap. The new ballpark’s the most expensive ever built, at a cool half-billion.

The old ballpark was old high-tech: All business. The new ballpark is the new high-tech, as prophesied in Kron and Slesin’s old book: Industrial luxury.

From the faux-aged brick false front along the 1st Avenue South side to the green steel girders buttressing the mammoth sliding roof, it embodies the same design aesthetic as the Bemis Building a block to its west. That’s one of those old warehouses that’s been gussied up into costly condos, where the cyber-nouveau-riche put up their Chihuly glass bowls among exposed pipework and concrete structural columns and imagine they’re living in “artist housing.”

Safeco Field is a way-cushy entertainment palace that merely looks old-fashioned as a luxury-design choice, intended by the architects to reinforce that George Will baseball-as-Americana feeling while still lushly pampering its patrons and charging them accordingly.

While neither Bill Gates nor Paul Allen is directly involved in the team or its management, the team’s new home clearly reflects the city as the suburban-residing Gates and Allen have helped re-define it.

A city where industry, the making and moving of tangible objects, is treated as a nostalgic memory.

A city where everything and everyone is expected to serve The Upscale, to the point of tax-subsidized luxury suites (still not sold out) within a tax-subsidized luxury stadium.

A city with no more patience for such quaint notions as thrift or mere adequacy; where everything must be World Class (even if it sports a back-to-basics look to it).

ELSEWHERE: The L.A. Times reports a clever Russian company’s found the perfect brand name for its cut-price detergent: “Ordinary Detergent,” copping the name and box design seen in ubiquitous Russian ads for a Procter & Gamble product. I’m still waiting for the chance to start my own band, “Special Guest” (they’d never headline a gig, but would open for everybody).

TOMORROW: Re-examing the age-old question, Does Seattle Suck?