SEATTLE — For many, the American dream kitchen has long been a grand showplace, filled with granite islands that stretch like aircraft carriers through a sea of shining appliances.

But in the urban technology centers that have become the nation’s new factory towns, the kitchen gold standard glorified in design magazines and lovingly ogled in Nancy Meyers movies is being redefined. In cities like this one, where Amazon plans to fill 10 million square feet of office space, the aspirational kitchens of young cooks have small footprints and shrunken appliances.

The microkitchen, stocked with expensive blenders, elaborate coffee makers and professional-quality knives, suits digital workers who eat free at work or take their meals in homey but globally influenced restaurants in their apartment buildings. Dinner may come from one of a dozen app-based delivery services, either as a fully prepared chef’s special or a meal kit that requires cooking but not much chopping.

That does not mean no one is cooking. Food has become a cultural touchstone, and what and how one eats are as important to some people in their 20s and early 30s as certain genres of music or film were to previous generations.

“We are kind of a showoff generation, and food very much matters, especially when you are around other people,” said Jolee Nebert, 22, a student of industrial design at Western Washington University. Last year, she packed a fully functioning kitchen into a 6-foot-long unit and won a design competition held at General Electric’s experimental factory in Louisville, Kentucky.

“People are willing to shrink the square footage of their kitchen for more versatility and more open space to entertain guests,” Nebert said. “It’s about packing more into less space.”

To be sure, apartment dwellers in big cities like New York, Paris and Tokyo have coped for ages with tiny kitchens as a matter of necessity, not choice. But these microkitchens are now being embraced by a group of early adopters who could easily afford much larger ones, and whose culinary preferences could shape kitchen design for years to come.

Smaller appliances

Appliance makers like General Electric, Miele and Bosch report rising demand for stoves that have been shaved by 6 inches, dishwashers a mere 18 inches wide and refrigerators that are set inside drawers. Sales of Miele’s 24-inch speed ovens, designed to cook food more quickly than standard ovens, have risen 37 percent since 2012. Sales of smaller convection ovens jumped 65 percent in that time, said Kathrin Pfeifer, the product manager for the company’s cooking appliances.

Although older buyers accounted for about three-quarters of the $6.2 billion spent last year on steamers, espresso makers and other small appliances, millennials were the only demographic group who bought more of them than they did a year earlier, according to the NPD Group, which studies consumer spending.

“If you look at the purchases among millennials, you see a picture of people trying to get more freshness out of these small kitchens quicker,” said Darren Cypher, a food and beverage industry analyst at NPD.

Attitudes toward cooking

Among America’s millennial generation, classified generally as the 60 million people ages 18-34, cooking is not viewed as a daily chore but as one of several ways to eat on any given day, said Laurie Demeritt, the chief executive of the Hartman Group, which studies trends for the food industry.

They like their meals to be healthful and authentic, but they cook only when the mood strikes. “I wouldn’t underestimate how engaged this generation is in food and cooking,” Demeritt said. “They are approaching cooking as a choice, which makes it more fun and whimsical and desirable.”

A year ago, Danny Rodichok, 31, and Christina Bruce, 28, moved into an 860-square-foot apartment with a kitchen not much bigger than a king-size bed, on the 23rd floor of the Via6 apartment building in downtown Seattle. Amazon is building its world headquarters across the street. They pay $3,379 a month in rent.

He works on his energy startup, called Green Kite, from home and she commutes to a sales job for Procter & Gamble. They eat at a coffee table in the living room.

There is a large pot of homemade soup in the refrigerator and pork chops in the freezer, but they make daily trips to the juice and coffee bar on the ground floor of their building, which also has a Japanese restaurant and a small grocery store called Home Remedy. It sells ecologically friendly laundry soap, Asian condiments, eight styles of salt and frozen lamb potpies alongside fresh pizza and a salad bar. Rodichok calls it “an overpriced hipster 7-Eleven.”

This was their first Thanksgiving together at home, and they wanted to cook for friends, so they hauled their food and some cooking equipment to the building’s large communal kitchen, designed by Tom Douglas, a chef who also runs the restaurants on the ground floor. It comes equipped with gas burners powerful enough to accommodate woks and Internet-ready cameras so the whole meal can be recorded and shared.

“The kitchen table at my grandmother’s house was the center of the universe,” Rodichok said. “To be honest, I really miss that. But when I get in the elevator and go down to the first floor, I have that ‘going into the family kitchen’ kind of feeling in a very urban, Seattle way.”

The building was designed for a Zipcar generation that embraces a sharing economy, said Matt Griffin, the Seattle developer who came up with the concept for Via6. “Life becomes having access to it but not necessarily owning it,” he said. “If your kitchen is efficient, it doesn’t need to be that big. Bigger just wears you out.”