SolarCity, the Silicon Valley solar installer, has quietly begun to offer some homeowners a lithium-ion battery pack made by electric carmaker Tesla to store electricity generated by their rooftop photovoltaic arrays. Stem, another Silicon Valley company, will sell or lease a $100,000, 54-kilowatt-hour battery pack to businesses so they can arbitrage the grid by storing electricity when rates are cheap and then using that energy when they’re high. — qz.com

Brazil's World Cup preparations suffered a deadly setback on Wednesday when a roof collapsed killing at least two building workers at the São Paulo stadium that is due to host the opening match.

Coming a week before the draw for next year's tournament, the fatalities revive concerns about unsafe infrastructure and the slow pace of construction, which have dogged the hosts for more than a year. — theguardian.com

Curated by architect and historian Joseph Abram, in collaboration with Rem Koolhaas’ OMA/AMO, the exhibition celebrates the work of Perret, in particular his extended use of reinforced concrete.

The exhibition analyzes, through more than 400 original documents such as sketches, pictures, scale models and personal letters, eight buildings conceived by Perret. These include the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées in Paris, along with the Hôtel de Ville and the Eglise Saint Joseph in Le Havre. — wwd.com

In the wake of the controversial demolition of Bertrand Goldberg’s Prentice Women’s Hospital, Northwestern University has moved forward with the process for selecting an architecture firm to design the building's replacement. Firms that protested the demolition, however, have been excluded from consideration for designing the building's replacement—and may be blacklisted from other projects at Northwestern. — architectmagazine.com

Google today launched an interactive map featuring Street Views of over 65 mass-transit hubs. The map features some locations you may have already explored, like Emirates' A380 or London's Gatwick Airport, alongside some new sites across Europe, South America, and Asia. — theverge.com

Oshin Vartanian and his colleagues slipped a group of people inside a brain-scanning machine and flashed hundreds of interior designs -- some curvy, some angular -- in front of them. They then had the choice of describing each room as either "beautiful" or "not beautiful."

The study found that participants overwhelmingly preferred interior spaces with curving coffee tables, meandering sofas and winding floor patterns to rooms filled with angular furniture and rectilinear design. — cnn.com

Crossrail is not just about engineering: artists, designers and archaeologists are all involved in the £15bn new railway. As the amazing tunnel-boring machines approach halfway, Rowan Moore dons his hard hat and goes below — theguardian.com

"Mr. Lewis had been a fan of Mr. Gehry’s work for years, and the men collaborated in the 1980s on a dream home for Mr. Lewis in suburban Cleveland, but their plans went comically awry. They could not agree on what the home should look like, and after 11 years of discussions, with the proposed budget reaching $82 million, Mr. Lewis called off the project." — NY Times

Yale sent out an email alert at 10:17 a.m. It read: “New Haven Police have received an anonymous call from a phone booth in the 300 block of Columbus Avenue reporting a person on the Yale Campus with a gun. There have been NOT confirmations or sightings of this person. Yale and New Haven police are in the area. If you have information, please call 911 immediately. Yale Police advises those on campus to remain in their current location and shelter in place until there is additional information.” — newhavenindependent.org

Zaha Hadid, the world’s best-known female architect, is none too pleased with critics like Jon Stewart, who have mocked her Al Wakrah Stadium—designed with AECOM for the 2022 World Cup in Qatar—and likened her to the “Georgia O’Keeffe of things you can walk inside.”

“It’s really embarrassing that they come up with nonsense like this,” Hadid tells TIME exclusively. “What are they saying? Everything with a hole in it is a vagina? That’s ridiculous.” — newsfeed.time.com

"Sometimes,” wrote Charles Lindbergh in his 1953 flight memoir, The Spirit of St. Louis, “the world from above seems too beautiful, too wonderful, too distant for human eyes to see.”

And sometimes, it looks like a bunch of genitals. — slate.com

Now here's a little weekend inspiration. "Lucid Stead" is an art installation by Phillip K. Smith, III in the beautiful desert landscape of Joshua Tree in California.

With some mirrors, LED lights, custom built electronic equipment, and Arduino programming, Smith transformed a 70-year-old homesteader shack into an architecture piece that complements and contrasts with its peaceful environment throughout the entire day. — bustler.net

There are usually four types of homes in science-fiction films: futuristic, retro, dystopian or modernist.

The futuristic, space-age dwellings are mostly white, in which tables and chairs might hover above the floor and doors slide open automatically with a hum. This was the default style of the mid-20th century. It has been used less frequently in recent years... — ft.com

The Macedonian government has spent huge sums turning its capital, Skopje, into a neo-baroque architectural nightmare. The project's gaudy excesses camouflage a disastrous economy and troubling record on human rights. — spiegel.de