Note that "National". It's nothing of the sort, of course - this is a regional attraction par excellence, devoted to the very long tradition of glass making in the area. They were making stained glass here well before the last Millennium - the Venerable Bede, the Anglo-Saxon scholar, mentions it - and they're still at it today, producing both "art glass" (just) and mass-produced glasses and Pyrex bowls. This is fascinating, and glass as a substance is one of the cornerstones of our civilisation, so it's understandable enough that someone should have come up with the idea of making a visitor attraction out its attributes. It seemed reasonably well attended when I saw it, a week after opening. The big restaurant and shop were doing good business. But I cannot see this attracting many people from outside the admittedly populous north-east.

It would no doubt have stayed as a local museum were it not for money from the National Lottery, in this case as disbursed by the Arts Council. European funding, another prerequisite of many such provincial projects in the 1990s - and which is about to dry up - made up most of the rest of the lavish £16m budget. An architectural competition was held, and it was won by a young London-based architect, Andrew Gollifer. As built, it is a prime example of a relatively inexperienced young architect's building - crudely made, full of infelicities, but ambitious and underpinned by vigorous ideas.

These are carried through with a certain doggedness. The building slopes out of the ground, helped by the steep riverbank site: the broad tilted roof thus becomes a plaza leading to a viewing platform overlooking the last windings of the River Wear before it meets the sea. The Centre is not just a museum/gallery, but is also intended to be a working glassworks, and a big one at that - so it is also a factory. And the whole building plays a game of setting off transparency against solidity, glass versus steel and concrete. On the whole, transparency loses out.

So when you're up walking on the roof plaza, as you're encouraged to do (though stern notices warn off skateboarders and cyclists - some hope) the concrete slabs beneath your feet yield at intervals to wide areas of thick non-slip glass. Look down, and you see into the interior of the building. Similarly when you're down below, you look up and see the shadowy shapes of people on the glass high above you. It would be nice to report that there's a sensation of walking on air, but there isn't: the massive girders needed to support this tilted plaza ensure that there is no hint of anything approaching delicacy or elegance.

This is no doubt fully intentional - the Centre is clearly designed to have a tough, no-nonsense, industrial feel to it and here, in the land of ghostly shipyards, you can understand why Gollifer might have been seduced by the lure of boilerplate technology. But inside, the sensation of weight pressing down on you is palpable - and somewhat regrettable in a building devoted to the almost mystical qualities of glass.

The Centre's best side - indeed, its only conventional facade - is on the river. This is all glass, beneath the peaked cap of the roof plaza sticking out on top. There are some rather obtrusive sunshading louvres - necessary, since you can feel the place start to heat up the moment the sun comes out - but on the whole this frontage works pretty well. The best view of it is however from the working wharves and invading yuppie apartments on the opposite bank. And this is not the view that anyone approaching the new building sees.

The main entrance is at the back, via a broad ramp set between the two lumpen, graceless chimneys of the glassworks beneath. It feels like the service yard of a Sixties office block. Or, you can wander along from the side, especially from the swoopy-roofed, rough timber-clad new St. Peter's Campus of the University of Sunderland next door. In which case, you're let down again, since the architect doesn't seem to have worked out what to do with the sides of his building at all.

The flanks are roughly chopped off, with odd bits of the innards brought to a brusque conclusion. Again, this can be considered part of the overall aesthetic - this is an assemblage of parts rather than some sleek enclosure - but on those terms, the side treatment is strangely half-hearted. Take for instance the pod-like rooms, clad in stainless steel, that Gollifer has placed at either end of the mezzanine level. These protrude at angles into the outside world - but again, not in a convincingly Deconstructive way. You just note them, and wonder why they are there. Incidentally, when will architects learn that stainless steel does not stay stainless in a maritime, industrial atmosphere? There are already signs of corrosion.

Although the money was available to build the National Glass Centre, there isn't very much cash to run it. So from the first, it was conceived as a place that had to generate its own income. Thus the two galleries, on either side of the central reception, feel a bit incidental compared with the hugely important shop and restaurant. One, the Kaleidoscope Gallery, is a permanent exhibition on glass in all its aspects, and is pretty good in that now familiar Science Museum hands-on way. The other is for changing shows. The opening one is "Glass UK", devoted to the kind of Crafts Council-approved contemporary studio glass that is little different in impact or wearisomeness from equivalent displays of trying-too-hard ceramics.

So the galleries don't detain you long, whereupon it's downstairs to the shop and restaurant (called "Throwing Stones"), which take the prime position on the riverside and rise the full height of the building. The restaurant is a good place to be because of the space and the view, and is already popular. The shop manages to tread the fine line between conventional good taste (those studio bowls again, plus of course a lot of Dartington Glass from Devon) and the demotic stuff like marbles and glass animals that people usually like to buy.

However the lynchpin of the whole enterprise is the integral glassworks, and this Ruskinian enterprise is yet to be proven. The factory area is very big, with a few small kilns in it and not much going on. Sunderland Glassworks Ltd, as it is known, is in fact the rump of Britain's last traditional maker of stained glass, Hartley Wood, which rather inconveniently closed down in December 1997 after more than 1300 years of such activity in the city. While they are setting up, you can of course watch glassblowers at work, a spectator activity that I associate with desperation measures taken on wet family holidays.

The glass-making here is meant to generate a healthy income to cover the running costs of the centre. It is an interesting development - museums have long been dependent on sales, now this one is going into manufacture as well, and making that part of the visitor experience - but by anyone's standards this counts as one hell of a gamble. If it fails, then the museum can't shrug it off - it will leave a great big empty hole in its middle, and no money to run the rest.

The National Glass Centre is unusual. It is certainly unrefined. It shows plenty of promise - we can all look forward to Gollifer's next big building but one. But apart from the time I spent sitting in the restaurant with a glass of wine, watching the fishing fleet sail in up the Wear, I hated every minute I was there.

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