The new arena is located on the shores of Lake Bordeaux, on the northern outskirts of the city, next to the exhibition center. The stadium is designed for 42,000 spectators: this size is quite justified, since the local football and rugby teams, for which the sports complex is intended, are among the strongest in France. In addition, the stadium will host matches of national championships in both sports this year, as well as a meeting between the national football team and the Serbian team, and in a year Bordeaux will host the matches of Euro 2016. In addition, the stadium is designed to host various shows, concerts and corporate events.
The architects have tried to give their building elegance, although they admit that in the architectural context, this concept is depreciated today. Although Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, together with their partner Stéphane Marbach, by their own admission, were not inspired by the design of the historic building of Bordeaux, known for its "unity and uniformity of scale and material, precision and purity of form", they still learned from its example …
As a result, the stadium is designed in white and consists of three basic - abstract, but, nevertheless, sculptural - forms: a stepped base, a stadium bowl with a relief resembling a step, and a rectangular membrane roof. The return to large basic forms, however, is not complete: the arena is surrounded by a forest of thin columns, which is intended to make the structure more open, accessible to the visitor - in contrast to the ancient temple, which still resembles a stadium a little.
The theme of the regularly spaced columns is continued by 664 trees planted around according to the design of the landscape architect Michel Devin.
A tape with catering points and bathrooms wriggles among the columns. The stadium also contains, in addition to the usual VIP zones and a press center, a restaurant and a shop of FC Bordeaux. The roof completely covers the stands from bad weather, where each seat has 100% visibility. Its neutral bottom surface is designed to switch spectators' gazes on the pitch - if they suddenly get distracted from it.
