Outrage.

Aldo Rossi was one of the twentieth century's most tender and thoughtful writers about the city, so it is a paradox that his urban work was often exceedingly tough, inhuman and unpitying.

Since his death in 1997, Rossi's ideas and buildings seem rather to have fallen out of architectural consciousness, but they are likely to become the focus of fierce debate again. Cecilia Cali writes from Milan urging that his Arena project should be the subject of this column. After over eight years, the Arena has been dusted down by the city council which intends to build after all. But Call points out that 'although it was designed by one of the most famous architects in the past 20 years ... it is completely out of date from the functional point of view (the opinion of the majority of experts in sport and leisure facilities over 10 years ago when it was designed)'.

Rossi's typological theories caused him to forge the new building out of an amphitheatre set within a walled city with defensive towers, surrounded by a cluster of lower extra-mural subsidiary types. Rossi's usual austerity (either blank walls or masonry planes penetrated by the most rigorously regular grid of rectangular windows) is set off by what -- for him -- were joky incidents: red tops to the towers and other passages of intense colour. Rossi's heavy levity could sometimes be endearing, for instance in his delightful floating theatre in Venice. But here, it makes the buildings look as if they are built of giant Lego which, as Cali says 'expresses an absolute post-modernist kitsch'.

Save us Italians, she cries, from 'another example of post modernism which is destroying our cities'.