The team that mistook its stadium for a hat

Some of the art has to compete visually with the plethora of advertising and concession signage in the concourses. The graphic designer CommArts, of Boulder, Colorado, primarily works on shopping centers—fitting, since the Mariners seem to have adopted the mall as a design paradigm. The signs were not all installed at deadline time, but commercialism seems rampant. The immense main scoreboard, one of 11, and 56 feet by 190 feet, has an impressive LED color display and a large monochrome matrix board, but these occupy only 36 percent of the surface. The rest will be taken up by 6500 square feet of ads.

The scoreboard is a metaphor for the entire stadium project: A small portion benefits the public, while the greater part generates money for the Mariners. This project was always less about the esthetics of playing on grass than about amassing the green stuff. It was less about ballpark intimacy than bottom-line vastness. It was also about the way sports teams can seduce a segment of the public and intimidate most of their elected representatives.

Dominic Arizona Bonuccelli

Safeco's view of the Kingdome

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• Seattle Mariners
• Kingdome
• Monster Park
• Oriole Park at Camden Yards
• Safeco Field

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Buildings are only as good as their clients, and in this case the clients were not the citizenry, or the legislators, or even the Public Facilities District, but rather a Mariners organization unsuited to the task. The team's greed and vanity deprived Seattle of something that lay well within the realm of possibility five years ago: a true open-air ballpark north of the Kingdome, compact and reasonably priced, that was an integral part of a solid city neighborhood. It could have been Wrigley Field West—but even better, in that Pioneer Square's concentration of history, architecture, and consumer attractions knocks the socks off anything that Chicago's Wrigleyville has to offer. We gave the Mariners enough money to buy the best ballpark in the world, but they blew it on a hasty schedule and a superfluous roof. It's enough to make anyone other than John Ellis cry.