The other big idea is more prosaic but just as effective. A pitch surounded by an athletics track - like Wembley - distances the spectator from the football action. So at the Stade, the architects have designed the lowest of the three tiers of seating in retractable units that cover the track. For athletics events the units are rolled back. It's a cumbersome manual process, taking days to complete - the budget would not run to the powered systems that would surely be ideal for this purpose. But it means that for football matches the front rows are near the sacred turf, while those right at the back of the stands are a maximum of 85 metres from the pitch. It's a long way, but in some other stadia you are considerably more remote. I've sat up there, and the highest back row still feels engaged with the green rectangle.

Macary, Zublena and their colleagues spent a lot of time thinking about the outside of the Stade. They want it to be urban, to engage with the city. A big new commercial development of offices, apartments, cinemas and shops is to be built alongside. For this reason they rejected the current fashion for huge spiral exit ramps around the perimeter, instead opting for quite short, steep flights of steps, rising from the ground on boat-like prows of polished concrete (there are lifts for the disabled). Shops and restaurants are slotted in under the stands, and will stay open for the neighbourhood - as will the panoramic restaurant above the presidential suite, which looks one way over the pitch, and the other way across to the skyline of Paris.

Unlike the new Ajax stadium in Amsterdam, which dominates the flat landscape horribly because it is so high - the pitch starts way up in the air on top of a car park - The Stade pitch is sunk slightly into the ground, so reducing the outside impact somewhat. This trick is an old one - it's used on Werner March's Berlin Olympics stadium of 1936, for instance - but the effect is stunning: you emerge into the light through the underside of the stands, and suddenly realize that the place is even bigger than you thought.

A big sports stadium is all about the macro image, very little about detail design, and this is true here. There is a clever low-tech pitch perimeter fence which folds down in half so that you hardly notice it - but which can be raised in a jiffy when troublesome fans are on the way. The signage is discreet, in that French public service tradition familiar from airports and the Metro. The roof, when seen close to, is tough rather than delicate despite its inner annulus of glass, which lets the sun reach the grass: the massive structural engineering is however largely cunningly hidden within the casing of the roof along with the public address system. There is practically no detritus hanging from it. On top, the covering is PVC, as forbidden on our own dear Millennium Dome for environmental reasons. The underside consists of concentric rings of acoustic panels, to deaden the roar a little.

The point about the Stade is that the handful of design ideas which make it different are carried through with conviction. It is a stimulating place to be, and it has jump-started the urban regeneration of what had been a sadly neglected industrial corner of the capital - rather like North Greenwich, home of the Dome. Strange to say, M. Zublena had just come back from a study trip to the Dome. He seems to think Britain is the architectural promised land. I tell him we've got nothing like the Stade.

• Cost: £260 million.
• Surface area of roof: 6 hectares.
• Weight of roof structure: 13,000 tonnes, or 1.5 Eiffel Towers.
• Total stadium surface area: 17 hectares.
• Total stadium weight: 500,000 tonnes.
• Capacity: 80,000 for football/rugby, 76,000 for athletics, 105,000 for concerts and shows.
• but "only" 6,000 car park spaces.
• 120 entrance gates.
• 148 private boxes.
• 6,000 corporate seats with reception rooms.
• 1100 disabled spaces.
• 2,450 press places for the World Cup.
• 670 toilets.
• 17 shops, 50 kiosks, 50 bars, 3 restaurants.
• 37 lifts.
• Workforce during construction: 1,300.
• Workforce during World Cup: up to 2,500.
• Permanent skeleton staff: 90.