Professor Mary Lou Lobsinger has received the ACSA/JAE/AIA award for the top article published in architecture in 2006. Her article The New Urban Scale in Italy. On Aldo Rossi’s L’architettura della città, appears in a special issue of the Journal of Architectural Education titled 1966: Forty Years After. The article was subject to the stringent criteria of the double blind peer review process – unusual for architecture publications. Her article brings new evidence to bear upon the rise of urban theories in the late 1950s and early 1960s arguing that Rossi’s book responded to a particular cultural context galvanized by the radical transformation in the scale of the European city and the onslaught of an accelerated form of capitalism in Italy. Rossi’s work was by no means that of an isolated architect, it was fully immersed in a specific historical context and cultural discourse. Lobsinger’s use of evidence – Italian and French languages sources, primary archival material and foreign newspaper articles – challenges the Anglo-American reception of Rossi’s book that has long dominated interpretations of architecture theory and urban design. Lobsinger's use of sources unavailable to the English reading audience demonstrates that North American architects discovered Rossi’s book long after the European debates over city scale, form and politics had moved on to other issues. She concludes the article by questioning the current trend to adjectivizing urban change, the preoccupation with giganticism, decentralization, and self-organizing systems asking if there is not something to be learned from the polemics of the early 1960s. Although responding to a completely different context–the European city–the various theories of urban form and scale played out forty years ago are in many ways resonant with contemporary postures.