New Packaging for the EMP?

File this one under the Department of Things We Actually Like: Esther da Costa Meyer's new book Frank Gehry: On Line (Princeton University Press, $29.95), which comes inside an ingenious corrugated cardboard slip cover. Within, the small paperback looks like it's made of brushed, stainless steel. Like hard inside of soft, the structure inside the skin, only everything is 100 percent recyclable. (Though design geeks will keep it forever, of course.)

Gehry's architecture and sketches are presently being featured at Princeton, and this is essentially the catalog for the exhibit. Closer to home, Paul Allen's scalloped, multicolored, titanium-skinned, monorail-pierced Experience Music Project is the only local sample of the L.A. architect's work. It's famously a building with Too Much Going On (unlike his more successful museum in Bilbao, Spain). But then Gehry is a flamboyant designer who got initial notice for wrapping houses in chain-link fencing and such.

Somehow, too, this book-and-box combo recalls old ad campaigns from print and TV. You know the sort--a pickup truck or Rolls driving across a cardboard span. Or an elephant standing on a cardboard box to show how strong it is.

Of course, Gehry is such a famous boutique architect, working at such a high commission rate (which is why he and Allen parted company on EMP's awful, touristy interior), that Seattle will probably never again host one of his designs. Unless it's made out of something cheap, like cardboard. In which regard our city's homeless population is way ahead of him.