Rock fort.

A new stadium for rock concerts in a red-stained desert proclaims in monolithic form the energy of rock music and barren beauty of the landscape.

In designing a new stadium, principally for rock concerts but also for sports, near the town of Vitrolles in the south of France, Rudy Ricciotti has turned his back on the usual High-Tech, high-tensile structures.

Vitrolles, to the north of Marseilles, is the main commercial and technical centre for the Plateau d'Arbois, and Le Stadium has been built close to a main road running to the town's industrial zone. In these post-Brutalist, glass and steel obsessed days, the building is something of a shock: a concrete monolith rising like a block of anthracite out of a semi-desert stained by the red detritus of bauxite from local mining. After dark when studded with tiny red flame-like lights, the mass evaporates into the night. A megalithic stone set horizontally almost at the base of the building signals the entrance; and before it, is a deserted plain of a car park without adornment except for embedded sparks of light and a metal palm tree.

Filmic resonances are strong, rebounding off Cecil B. de Mille to hit Indiana Jones' Temple of Doom somewhere in darkest Peru. Less romantically, the site was once a municipal rubbish tip as well as being a dumping ground for bauxite. Once you know this, your perception of the building changes as in a Rorschach test, and images of waste disposal plants, apparently gnawed around the edges by heaven knows what, come to mind. In the past, Ricciotti has been accused of possessing a British sense of humour. Whether or not this is so, the architecture of Le Stadium betrays ironic sensibilities that, gradually revealed, rob a monumental building of grandiloquence and instil wit.

There are two parts to the building: the main mass containing a vast auditorium with terraces of seating and an arena; and a subsidiary, megalithically proportioned structure housing the administration and paraphernalia of entrance. The two are separated by a narrow fissure, occupied on either side by a flight of steps leading up to offices and a rooftop patio. At this level, a huge window cut into the wall of the main building gives onto the blank wall of the office block, so that the fierce Mediterranean light is deflected and sent obliquely into the interior of the entrance hall.

On plan and in section, the main building is simply and logically organised, with the concrete structure being left exposed and easily read. The entrance hall with box office and cloakroom is beneath the terraces which are reached in the normal way by successive flights of stairs. Within the auditorium, the enormous court, built to accommodate handball and boxing, runs the width of the building with stage lighting and other technical services on metal gantries overhead. Acoustics in the hall are finely tuned to the requirements of rock concerts, and the arena can be adjusted by means of curtains and a temporary stage, with technicians being housed high up at the rear.

The architectural composition is minimal, the materials rugged, but this is a sophisticated building that without recourse to complicated geometries is in tune with the primitive energy of the music and raw surroundings. Throughout it is enlivened by Ricciotti's personal touches: the Provencal-inspired metal balustrading, the recurring star and sunflower motifs, the slashed turnstiles meant to evoke the pain of parting with money.

In the end, you have to ask how the French manage such projects, particularly in the light of the recent controversy in Britain over Zaha Hadid's opera house in Cardiff. It is inconceivable here in Britain that an architect given a budget for external planting should spend all of it, as Ricciotti has done, on a metal palm tree. Yet given the building and its setting, this is quite appropriate. Site workers called this building the Kaaba, after the Muslim's sacred black stone at Mecca said to mark the point where communication with heaven and the underworld is easiest.