January 28th, 1998. The new ‘Stade de France’ passed the test of its opening football match with flying colours. Almost 80,000 faithful congregated at this event of public worship. But more than a success, it was a relief for the organizers, not because France won, nor because no hooligans made any trouble after the game, but simply because there were no traffic jams involved.

Most people had in fact forgotten that the new stadium had been set in an urban environment, almost at the intersection of the boulevard peripherique and the A1 freeway, which is one of the most overloaded traffic zones around Paris. The warning came from the first official opening while the stadium was still under construction. Only VIPs were invited then and many had got stuck in the traffic.
There was no game that day and public authorities realized what chaos there could be on game days. To avoid a nasty shock at the opening game, it was decided that officials, ministers included, would come to the stadium by public transport and that a train ticket would be attached to the invitations of the lucky spectators.
This somewhat comical situation is rather disappointing when you are talking about a 2.7 billion francs facility. However it is symptomatic of the difficulties and conflicts that emerged with the construction of the stadium. It also relates to some of the major issues informing the Stade de France.

Symbolism

A stadium can be considered as an architectural type in the sense Nikolaus Pevsner gave to it. The stadium built for the last soccer World Cup of the century could only express the true essence of the type and would become the perfect model of the stadium with a universal value. This symbolic determination is probably the most important issue.
The World Cup is a planetary event which sets out to link 37 billions spectators through the medium of television. And the stadium is part of a system, which makes its 80,000 seats seem ridiculous. So why not build just a 40,000 seat stadium? Why at the time of cyberspace could one not organize a World Cup around a simple pitch? Precisely because the question is not just watching a series of games, but creating the conditions for a planetary event. Human beings need meaning, symbols and rituals. And the Stade de France is there to provide them. It is subordinated to the tv media and the potential enormous financial profit.1 It is just because 80,000 people communicate together at a game that 37 billion tv spectators may communicate with them or rather have that impression, as if they were there, through the illusion of a total fusion.2 Thus the stadium is organized for this possible ritual identification. It is a self-contained totality, closed around itself and its symbolism. The physical context in which the stadium is set does not belong to this media-related system and is taken into account inasfar as controlling may help the stadium to function well. In other words the context is not a dynamic element of the architectural design, and the stadium logically looks like an isolated object, disconnected from its setting; it is an object which could have been built anywhere else.

Unity, legibility, regularity

The physical aspect of the stadium, then, tends to impose the image of a clear unity. And its elliptical plan seems as close as possible to a circle, as if all spectators would then be at an equal distance from the centre.3 Two devices reinforce this unity further and absorb the possible disruptive elements of the brief: the roof and the façade treatment.
The roof is arguably the most characteristic feature of the stadium. It is a gigantic flat halo (the symbol of the universality of sport according to the design team, but also a clear religious quotation) suspended from 18 towers (60 m high). From the outside, it represents a major referential element that evens out the height variation of the different tribunes.
The wide roof provides a shelter against wind and weather for the 80,000 spectators. After being tested in a wind tunnel, it has been loaded with concrete rings in order to resist 154 km/h winds. Its disassociation from the rest of the building is clearly expressed, though the ring is not floating in the air since its size does not allow for such lightness. Its covering surface is so important (60,000 m², the area of the Place de la Concorde) that an internal glass ring was necessary to bring sufficient light to the pitch. And it is true that at the higher tribunes, the roof cuts off the view of the sky. At night the reflection on the metal cladding of the light from the edge uplighters transforms the ring in a monumental light feature which goes on to integrate sound equipment and the direct lighting of the pitch.
The façade treatment is the other unifying element. The stadium is not a simple building, it is a complex machine which besides the athletes’ facilities, the press hall and the tribunes includes two restaurants, a seminar and exhibition centre of 8000 m² with an auditorium and a reception hall, 4000 m² of retail space and 2000 m² of offices. All these are enveloped by a stainless steal mesh running all around the building. If unity is probably the main concept presiding over the stadium’s design, it forms together with the concepts of legibility and regularity a coherent and somewhat classical conceptual apparatus which can be easily identified.
Legibility of construction is effected by a slightly elementarist approach which tends to isolate and disassociate elements (the roof, the supporting towers, the skin of the enclosure, the monumental and finely formed stairs, etc.). At the same time, it imparts an architectural and functional clarity. And the regularity in the spatial distribution of elements brings visual stability to the whole at the same time reinforcing the impression of cohesion.
These physical characteristics definitely show a building that refrains from articulating the question of context as a prior issue of the design process. In this sense, the Stade de France expresses an architectural position opposite to that of Gaudin’s Charléty Stadium for instance which weaves cleverly with the urban fabric.4 However, one of the most interesting sides of the Stade de France is, paradoxically, what it indirectly reveals about the site.

The problem of the location

Although the pitch is buried 11 m below ground level so as to reduce the overall height of the stadium to 35 m and thus limit its visual impact on the surroundings, the question of the site was not a truly architectural issue; it was, since the origin of the project, a political one.
In January 1991, Michel Rocard, the then prime minister, had chosen the new city of Melun Sénard, 35 km from Paris, as the site on which to build the stadium. The idea was to integrate the new facility within the general redevelopment programme for the Ile-de-France region, and to correct eastward the balance of the Parisian region. Accessibility was easy and there was plenty of land available, but the sports lobby were unenthusiastic about such an off-centre location. Several other proposals were put forward by other cities closer to the city. When the Right Wing came to power in March 1993, the new prime minister immediately ruled out Melun Sénard. St-Denis then emerged as the most probable candidate. In October 1993 E. Balladur decided to organize a competition for the design, construction and management of the new stadium at La Plaine St-Denis.5
The city of St-Denis was waiting for this decision to give a new dynamic to the urban redevelopment plan for the area. The Plaine St-Denis was (and is still) a large derelict industrial zone which had remained an enclave isolated between the Boulevard Périphérique on the south side, the Canal St-Denis on the east and north sides, and the SNCF railway on the west side. The zone was also cut through its centre by the tray of the A1 freeway. The only logical structure that can be identified in this dislocated space, comes from the internal railway distribution over the former industrial lots.
Most post-industrial metropolises are confronted with the redevelopment of such zones. The specific nature of the Plaine derives from its very location right at the edge of Paris, as an isolated pocket in the middle of the urban fabric. The other point is that despite being a derelict industrial zone, since before the Middle ages it had been the ceremonial route linking the capital to St-Denis Abbey, the burial place of the kings. A team of urban designers was commissioned to make a proposal for redevelopment of this prestigious site, the main objective being to bring a mix to the zone and find a new balance between housing and other activity.6 The project was ambitious and the economic crisis precluded most of it from being realized. The construction of the large stadium was considered the only possibility of saving the project for the Plaine.

The induced effects

It may be initially surprising that urban planners thought of the stadium as a potential structural element for the quarter since such facilities are generally taken as detrimental to urban developments. People who live next to a large stadium know the kind of nuisance it creates in an urban quarter. The fact that this restraining factor can be reversed at St-Denis has not been proven yet. However it is obvious that the specific conditions of the stadium’s siting in the Plaine will keep harmful effects on the neighbourhood to a minimum. The stadium is in fact physically isolated from the rest of the Plaine, being located inside an enclave thus forming a potential protection for the quarter. But the quarter will directly benefit from the other public facilities linked to the construction of the stadium.
The covering of the A1 tray promised by the St-Denis authorities is finally under completion. The avenue President Wilson will proudly stretch along a planted space leading to the royal necropolis. Certainly, the problem of the emergence of the A1 at both ends won’t be solved but at least the Plaine will no longer be chopped in two.
Most important, probably, for the life of the neighbourhood is the complete reorganization of public transport. A métro station was renewed and two RER stations (B and D lines) were built for a total cost of 1.5 billion francs. All these works were made possible because of the stadium, which could not have survived without them. They also present a much higher potential for redevelopment of the Plaine than the stadium itself.

The hidden stadium

One of the most interesting aspects of the stadium is probably its hidden side. Few people know that buried beneath under the training pitch of the stadium, is the largest rainwater retention and depollution basin in Europe. This 165,000 m3 basin is built under two parking levels with 1400 spaces. It was designed to absorb water floods from differents quarters of St-Denis, Pantin Aubervilliers and Paris, and to depollute waste water by decantation and limit the added pollution in the river Seine during floods (there is no separation between rain water and waste water in the Parisian sewage system). The maximum flow the basin can absorb is 47 m3 per second, the equivalent of the Seine flow in summer.7
The construction of both basin and stadium were confronted with major soil pollution which generated considerable extra cost. The pitch of the stadium had to be completely isolated from the underneath soil. The underground was then (and still is) kept under low pressure and the extracted polluted gas and fluids treated in plants built near the site. The ecological dimension of the zone’s urban redevelopment had been underestimated. The stadium revealed the unprecedented scale of the problem. It showed that a large proportion of the zone is probably more polluted than was supposed, and that its redevelopment will be financially more difficult than expected.
An autonomous object, the Stade de France sits like a UFO in its environment. But this alien element has its interest in the various aspects of our contemporary urban conditions that it unveils. It stresses an abnormal needs for representation and fusion which seems to be the index of a loss of identity and a compensation for the painful feeling of living on the fringe of existence.8 The stadium’s unity by contrast reinforces the impression of dislocation in the urban fabric and surrounding public space. And its construction revealed the ecological challenge that the growth of our post-industrial megapolis is confronted with. The World Cup is starting soon, the stadium and the Plaine are ready to receive an 80,000 strong public. But the after-Cup life is still uncertain as a ‘resident club’ has yet to settle in the stadium. Not that this situation worries the stadium board, since by convention the state will yearly have to pay 70 million francs compensation. It is only in such majestic and expensive monuments, perhaps, that our western society can express its futility.9

1. Even the aesthetic judgement seems to be subordinated since a negative assessment would be a threat to the ‘religious experience’. The consensus amongst the media about the beauty of the stadium is suspect.

2. This phenomenon has been adroitly described by L. Sfez in his Critique de la Communication.

3. This is of course an illusion. The cross section through the stadium shows how far people at the top of the tribune can be from the pitch, and how difficult this makes watching the game. Not only the Stade de France, but most very large stadiums are confronted with this problem.

4. Michel Lévi, ‘The new Charléty Stadium in Paris. Henri Gaudin’s architecture of transfiguration’, Archis no. 9, 1994, pp. 36-47.

5. The winning team brings together the architects Mackary, Zublena, Regembal and Constantini, and a private consortium formed by three major French contractors, Bouygues, GTM and SGE.

6. At the root of the project was the ‘charte intercommunale’ for redevelopment of the Plaine St-Denis signed by the cities of Saint Denis, Aubervilliers, St Ouen and the Seine-St-Denis Department in 1990. The ‘Hyppodamos 93′ team, composed of landscape designer M. Corajoud and architects C. Devillers, Y. Lion, Reichen and Robert, and P. Riboulet made its first proposal in 1992. It was quickly modified to incorporate the new stadium.

7. Treatment of waste and rain water is one of the key issues in most large metropolises. The pace of growth of the Parisian region made it absolutely necessary to realize the basin at St-Denis. The authorities in charge of the waste system defended Macary and Zublena’s project against Nouvel and HOK’s. The former was preferred by the competition jury, since the latter could not integrate the basin on the site.

8. In La Société du Spectacle Guy Debord showed how the spectacle is the eradicating of the limit between the self and the world under pressure of the presence-absence of the world.

9. Richard Rogers’ Millennium Dome, with its empty programme, in London, is in a very similar situation.