GLENDALE, Ariz. — A franchise long labeled a wasteland among the otherwise fertile fields of the NFL finally has a home of its own.

And this is no one-bedroom fixer-upper. This is a $465 million palace.

"Man, it's sweet," running back Edgerrin James said. "It's everything you'd want in a stadium. I'm happy I came at the perfect time."

Cardinals Stadium, already voted one of the top 10 sports facilities in the world by Business Week magazine, makes its debut on Saturday when the Arizona Cardinals host the Super Bowl champion Pittsburgh Steelers in a preseason game.

Formed as a football club in 1898 and a charter member of the NFL in 1920, the Cardinals never had a stadium of their own until now.

The silver monolith in suburban west Phoenix was designed by Peter Eisenman, the first stadium for an architect whose works include the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin and the City of Culture in Galicia, Spain.

A team that toiled in front of meager crowds at Sun Devil Stadium on the Arizona State University campus is suddenly the talk of the town. The Cardinals, who last played in front of a capacity crowd at home in 2000, are sold out for all eight regular-season games in the 63,000-seat facility.

"We've been telling the rookies that they need to go play a couple of games in Sun Devil Stadium so they can appreciate the difference," wide receiver Anquan Boldin joked.

The fans will bask in air conditioned comfort under a retractable roof made of a translucent fabric that — along with a series of glass columns around the structure — fill the stadium with natural light.

The field of natural grass rests on a tray in the desert sun outside the stadium, and is rolled in and locked into place for the games. It is the first field of its kind in North America.

James, who in the offseason became the biggest free agent acquisition in the franchise's history, said the field is what makes the stadium special to him.

"All the other stuff looks good and it's fascinating, but I think that's for the fans," he said. "For us it's the surface. The surface is unreal, it's unbelievable. It's low cut and it's a fast track."

Eisenman designed the stadium to resemble the barrel cactus that grows wild in the area, although most would say it resembles some giant UFO that settled in among the farmland, tract houses and burgeoning strip malls.

"We were determined to take what would be a symmetrical bowl and turn it into a distinctive shape," he said at a news conference on Friday. "Not only is it a landmark a distinctive shape, it also is an icon, that is the general public can relate that shape to something they know of local character. This distinctive shape has two iconic relationships — one to the Native American mandala form, which you can see in the stadium, and two to the barrel cactus form that is indigenous to the area."