Riverside Museum of Transport

 There is a zone of Glasgow so studded with culture and architecture, so richly fertilised with public investment, while also blessed by nature with the noble breadth of the Clyde, that it ought to be a wonder of the world. This is not to question the achievement of the Riverside Museum of Transport and Travel, designed by Zaha Hadid Architects, or the pleasure to be had from its wonderful models of battleships and liners, its trams, cars, motorcycles and its giant steam locomotive built in Glasgow for South African Railways and now returned to its native city.

It is one of Hadid's most direct buildings, essentially a big, column-free shed mutated in two ways. First, its roof line is a jagged range of peaks and troughs, like Alps or gables abstracted to a cartoon; second, the shed is bent twice in plan, so that it takes the form of Z-shaped tube, whose end cannot be seen from the beginning. The profile of the cartoon Alps/gables is extruded through the length of the Z, as if squeezed from a gothic tube of toothpaste. Its underside forms the pleated ceiling of the shed, with strong horizontal lines leading you through the space. There are big, glass walls at each end: one is the entrance, the other frames a view of the tall ship Glenlee, moored outside.

The space is obviously about movement, suggesting the dynamism of which all the once-mobile exhibits are now deprived. There is something of train tracks or tram wires in the overhead lines and of train sheds and hangars in the building as a whole. It is not, however, a piece of faux industry in the style of many hi-tech science or transport museums around the world; it does not waggle girders and stud itself with rivets in fatuous emulation of trains and ships.The Hadid space, unified by a single hue of yellowish-green, is architecture, not equipment, a room, not a machine, in which a cheerful melee of objects can coexist.

It is a pleasingly old-fashioned museum, confident in the appeal of its exhibits, not interested in forcing narratives and fixed routes on them or burdening them with too much interpretation. It is like stumbling into the attic of the industrial revolution and finding a rich haul of old toys and tools. Hadid's space creates a sense of direction which, paradoxically, allows for diffuse displays through which visitors can meander. If the building were less purposeful, the whole experience would become confusion.