Coca-Cola Co. is a good citizen, to be sure. It gave some of its Baker Street property, home to its new museum, to the Georgia Aquarium and has offered more for a future civil and human rights museum. It is providing 5 acres for green space that will link the attractions.

If only its new museum building itself were a better neighbor.

Brant Sanderlin/Staff (ENLARGE)

The World of Coca-Cola turns a gray-beige backside to Centennial Olympic Park, but plantings may help conceal it.

MORE The New World of Coke

What I mean is, the new World of Coca-Cola is a world unto itself. It is oriented inward, its entrance facing the green space and the entrance to the aquarium. Granted, this set-up encourages intra-attraction attendance. And, granted, the building, designed by Jerde Partnership, cleverly mirrors the aquarium's swooping look with its own diagonal roofline in the opposite direction.

The result, however, is that the museum turns its considerable backside to Centennial Olympic Park. Much of that facade is a gray-beige expanse of corrugated metal, which, hopefully, the foundation plantings will some day conceal. There is a landscaped area in front of a floor-to-ceiling window looking into the atrium, and what looks to be a door. On my first visit, in fact, I mistook it for the entrance. (Now that the fence gate is closed, that confusion is less likely, but it's rather odd, like a prison garden.)

Jerde did a better job on the World of Coca-Cola's Techwood Avenue facade. Though it's a blank wall, too, the monumental graphics and window displays, not to mention the huge, historic Coca-Cola sign inside the glass-enclosed northwest corner, make us forget about it. Too bad the camouflage didn't wrap around the corner.

When you are inside Coke's world, it is pleasant enough. The two airy assembly spaces — the foyer and the atrium — feature floor-to-ceiling windows with views to the landscape. Cheerful graphics animate the capacious atrium whose openness, though probably intended to accommodate events, is a welcome antidote to the surprisingly tight exhibition spaces, so designed perhaps to funnel crowds through expeditiously. Both the foyer and atrium benefit from the display of the delightful international Coke-bottle sculptures commissioned for the 1996 Olympic Games.

Indeed, the individually crafted sculptures are among the few distinctive design elements, inside and out. Oh, for something like the Coca- Cola script that ran just below the roofline of the original museum, a tongue-in-cheek classical maneuver.

Designing a big-box attraction in an urban setting is a challenge, but not an insurmountable one. Check out the aquarium. That building makes a grand gesture to the street, even though its entrance is tucked inside. Its facade is a curving form further enlivened by color, and the materials look to be higher-grade. It doesn't feel as big as it is. And it's got character.

Poor Centennial Olympic Park faces its share of backsides. The Mart has an excuse since it was built when the park property was a warren of light industrial buildings. One would have expected that a 2007 design would be more sensitive, and more urbane.

The new World of Coca-Cola. 121 Baker St. 404-676-5151, www.worldofcoca-cola.com