Joined-up building?

In the current British boom for visitor attractions, why do the architects and the exhibition designers seem to be working in isolation rather than collaborating? Bristol's Wildwalk is a case in point, says Jay Merrick

In the Seventies, when he was 22 and fresh out of the Royal College of Art, John Csaky escaped from corporate design and exhibition work for Wolff Olins and designed the Milton Keynes Bowl instead. Then he ran the gigs there for three years, including a David Bowie concert. Then he hung around for a further six, designing landscape and urban features in the new town. It was all very Spiders from Mars.

He talks of it now with a mixture of agitprop atavism and wistful regret. Yes, it was new and fun, but the Bowl was also his first brush with municipal cost-cutting. The stadium was serviceable, but it wasn't right. And when Csaky looks back to that first blip on his career arc, exactly 30 years ago, it must be with wonder. How basic it all was, ad hoc regeneration at a time when that word seemed as exciting as the ultra-hi-tech tentage that links Csaky's Wildwalk visitor experience in Bristol with the old leadworks facing the docks.

The crowds amble across the groovy bridge that links the floating dock with Cannons Marsh. They have money and want to have a good time. And they find it in the restaurants, mega-pubs and visitor attractions – Wildwalk's Life on Earth displays are all of 50m away from the hands-on science experience at Explore, designed by Chris Wilkinson – that suck in hundreds of thousands of people every year. Urban regeneration, under lottery skies, is not initially for the deprived, but for those willing to venture into an acceptably grungy zone of change, provided it possesses a critical mass of leisure facilities.

John Csaky is for it. He would be. Rocking at Milton Keynes Bowl didn't stop him racking up a string of accomplishments in exhibition, resort-planning and special pavilions – notably via Fitch & Co in London and Seville – in the early Eighties and mid-Nineties. Since then, with his own team, he has become one of the A-list of designers regularly shortlisted for key leisure projects.

The interactive and "experiential" layout at Hull's highly successful submarium, The Deep, was mostly his doing; so, too, Plymouth's Mayflower project and Portsmouth's Action Stations centre. A big family-park project in Saudi Arabia is also under way.

But what makes visitor attractions work – and does the architecture matter that much? It did at Hull because the site demanded something Rock of Gibraltar-ish, which Sir Terry Farrell duly delivered. In Bristol, though, the story's quite different.

Despite its obvious attempt at big-gesture presence, the building that houses Wildwalk is peculiarly unengaging. It has Sir Michael Hopkins's trademark tents, and an inviting, pleasantly sculpted entrance hall, but little else: a botanic zone, some glass and tension bracing, a wooden raftered café – new meets old in a caring, sharing and jarringly unsubtle way – and steelwork whose geometry and connection to the brick cube that forms half of the whole structure is less than graceful. There is no clear order or rhythm to latch on to. Taken together, and from a variety of viewpoints, the building's elements feel disjointed.

Does any of that matter to the visitor experience, though? By the time Csaky and his young team were activated, the building was on site and its structure and internal volumes were set in stone – par for the course for lottery-funded projects. But why? Why should success or failure depend so little on genuine design synergies?

At Hull, Csaky found Farrell quite relaxed and hands-off about suggestions for internal tweaking. "Their office was very friendly to work with," he says. "The team was very young, and so was mine. Terry didn't try to dominate. He delegated and was very flexible." And Hopkins? "They were a bit flexible. I did argue for two double-height spaces, and they agreed."

But that was it. Ultimately, Csaky was presented with little more than a big black box to manipulate – considerably less than he got at The Deep, with its layered, serpentine spaces. Yet there's nothing to choose between the two as visitor experiences; and, in entirely different ways, both are interesting and enjoyable.

The Deep's core is a vast show-stopper of a fish tank. Wildwalk has markedly less architectural or internal wow-factor, but the spatial constraints forced Csaky and the project's dynamic mentor, Chris Parsons, to dig very deep indeed. As a result, Wildwalk is an inherently more stimulating educational tool.

"We were evolving and dispersing the Wildwalk story round the building even as it was being designed in detail," says Csaky. "We worked much more closely with the client than the architect. They were at pains not to let us have discussions with the architects on our own." But of course: why risk anarchy?

"This was much more than the BBC's Life on Earth in 3D," he says. "The real challenge was getting our heads round a very complex storyline in a way that was paced and not exhausting." Which meant taking people across 2,000 square metres of floor space, past 200 displays, 100 interactive screens, and 20 tanks containing live creatures – with two serpentine detours through the botanic greenhouse zones. "And if it doesn't tell a story, it doesn't work."

But it does work. Reading, storytelling and exploration are essentially obsessive and intimate pursuits. Dark, light-pooled spaces can set up inquisitive mindsets. Where are we? Where next? What's that? Despite being full of children last Thursday, Wildwalk was not echoing with yells and loutishness. There were, instead, mostly low voices and a palpable feeling of intentness.

What's the trick? In principle, it's quite simple: you shuffle the pack of interactives, static displays, floor areas, mini-vistas and big-screen conceptual information to compress and decompress the visitor-flows; and, on top of that, you mix up the kind of information visitors come across. One of Wildwalk's most crucial triumphs is also its most subtly achieved: even after a couple of dozen touch-screens and static displays, there's no notable feeling of dreary repetition.

There is on the dockside, though. The unfortunate mixed-use building for Lloyd's Insurance reiterates all that remains depressing about redevelopment architecture in the Eighties – design without individuality, power dressing morphed into lumpen buildings that, far from stimulating a sense of renewal, cry out for a wrecking-ball.

Hopkins's building doesn't do that. And yet, despite the popular, job-done success of Wildwalk, a "what if?" still hangs in the air. Could Wildwalk, and dozens of Britain's other new-wave visitor attractions, have been even better if architects and exhibition designers had sat at the same mixing-desk from the outset? Two decades ago, Bowie at the Bowl was an ad hoc venture; too often, and for no good reason, it is the same in today's quest for the architecture of mass amusement.

www.at-bristol.org.uk/wildwalk