AC Milan’s Serie A championship title over the weekend brought out the missives on placemaking and memory concerning the club’s future in the 96-year-old stadium adored by the Milanese as their seconda casa. 

The facilities, last upgraded in 1990 and renovated throughout the 2000s by the local firm Ragazzi and Partners, are set to be replaced by a new “cathedral” designed by American sport heavyweight Populous for the year 2027. Many feel it is the last victim of a changed European Soccer landscape dominated by Russian oligarchs and other monied interests from abroad after the late-1990s to early-2000s. 

Alternatives, including its reuse as a massive Covid memorial, have been proposed by the faithful, who also claim a demolition effort of such size would be harmful to the environment. A final approval is still on the horizon for later this year. The architects of the new stadium say their concerns will be incorporated into the design, and that part of San Siro’s physical legacy will carry on well after its intended finale as the site of the 2026 Winter Olympics opening ceremony. 

“I think these buildings are containers, and therefore the old buildings have such emotion attached to them that the idea that some of it can remain, if it can be there as a marker of history of what was before, is quite a nice idea,” Populous’ EMEA managing director Chris Lee told the New York Times. “One has to be careful about trying to transfer too much of that, literally, into new buildings, where it can easily tip into the pastiche of trying to recreate a building.”