BRISTOL NEW HEART.

Two new and neighbouring major millennium buildings are intended to bring new life to a decayed industrial area of Bristol.

Bristol's industrial waterside area became, like many others, run down as the economy changed, but is is now getting new life. One of the most powerful engines of regeneration is hoped to be at-Bristol, a Millennium project which mainly consists of two large and loosely related building complexes: Wildscreen at-Bristol by Michael Hopkins & Partners and Explore at-Bristol, by WilkinsonEyre.

An elegant 1903 Hennebique concrete goods shed is being transformed into Explore at-Bristol. The warehouse structure with its elegant curved beams and slender columns was largely suitable for the interactive scientific displays that will make up most of the exhibits. On the south front, facing New World Square, a generous arcade is created by setting back the cladding of the ground floor. At first floor level, a bridge connects to a planetarium in a 15m diameter stainless-steel sphere sitting in a pool.

On the north front, a new gallery is provided by making a full-height transparent wall from glass, with systems which will have special lighting conditions to respond to passers-by and the seasons. At each end of the gallery is a large object. One is a stair clad in timber strips. The other is a cylinder of transparent acrylic and is full of hundreds of coloured plastic balls. These are themselves filled with eutectic salts: materials which change from solid to liquid at a fairly low temperature (actually 27 degC). The latent heat of their change of state warms or cools surrounding water, through which it can be distributed to the building's local heat pumps. The balls' colour changes too, from pink to blue and back again as the eutectic process proceeds. The building itself becomes one of its own exhibits. Other temperature control devices range from using natural ventilation (where possible) to solar shading on the roof. Like many of the Millennium landmark projects, the building is intended to set an exam ple of sustainable energy use.

Next to the WilkinsonEyre scheme is Wildscreen at-Bristol, which is to be a celebration of the natural world that builds on the biennial Wildscreen Festival of Moving Images from the Natural World, founded in 1982. The Wildscreen building forms a permanent home for the Festival and allows moving images of nature to be seen all year round, and much else too. Key elements are exhibition galleries, a tropical botanical house, an MAX theatre and the nineteenth-century Leadworks, which is being conserved as an integral part of the complex.

The MAX is at the northern apex of the roughly triangular site, where its imperforate masonry drum protects its interior from noise of surrounding busy traffic. At the site's southern end is the low irregular mass of the Leadworks, which is being converted into shop and caf[acute{e}]. A most original parti connects these two very disparate elements. Entrance is from the south, next to the leadworks and leading into a generous foyer, on each side of which are elements of the botanical house, the main part of which is slung over the entrance route, with ETFE foil cushion walls canted to the south behind the leadworks. Between conservatory and the drum of the MAX is a stack of single, double and triple height exhibition spaces that make up the 'electronic zoo'; on top is a terrace which looks out south over the conservatory and Leadworks. The very diverse elements of the complex are sewn together by translucent white tents.

It is too early to see how at-Bristol will work as a new piece of city: both the main buildings are yet to be finished. But the intended mix of uses and the combination of formal urban geometry with the partly historically determined irregular relationship of the two major elements promises well.