For 100 years, the Los Angeles Aqueduct has delivered water to a thirsty city, wending its way for more than 200 miles from the Owens Valley, through canyons and deserts, down to the modern metropolis. A feat of engineering and a product of political maneuvering, it nurtured the region's growth while leaving conflict in its wake. — graphics.latimes.com

It's a good week for Olafur Eliasson: earlier today, we reported that the Rolex Arts Initiative had selected the Berlin-based artist as its Visual Arts mentor for 2014-2015, and now we found out that MIT's Council for the Arts will present him with the 2014, 40th anniversary Eugene McDermott Award in the Arts at MIT. The award includes an artist residency, pop-up exhibitions, a public lecture, and a $100,000 cash prize. MIT students will also get to work on Eliasson’s Little Sun project. — bustler.net

It isn't clear what the artwork will look like, though a person familiar with the matter said it would have a "gathering" theme. But it will be expensive: Mr. Ross, chairman of builder Related Cos., has told friends and associates the company intends to spend as much as $75 million on the centerpiece and surrounding public space. — online.wsj.com

Modern architecture, and the fight for its value in the world, is brought into sharp focus in this documentary examining the battle over the preservation of former Prentice Women’s Hospital in downtown Chicago, designed by master modern architect Betrand Goldberg.

The communities and neighborhoods along the LA River in the Northeast of Los Angeles have traditionally had poor access to parks and open space. The Riverside Bridge is an opportunity to immediately transform the bridge span into a park to enjoy recreationally and to connect the Glassell Park and Cypress Park communities to the Greater Los Angeles area. It is also an opportunity for extending the LA River Greenway Trail to Downtown Los Angeles and to Pasadena for bicyclists and pedestrians. — change.org

Six months after the Japanese government approved Hadid’s proposals, the country’s parliament has signalled a reverse in its support.

Hakubun Shimomura, the minister in charge of education, sports and science, said that the New National Stadium would cost 300 billion yen (£1.8 billion) to build and that was “too massive a budget”.

The design of the 80,000-seat stadium will be preserved but Mr Shimomura said: “We need to rethink this and scale it down.” — standard.co.uk

the nastier the comments, the more polarized readers became about the contents of the article, a phenomenon they dubbed the “nasty effect.” But the nasty effect isn’t new, or unique to the Internet. Psychologists have long worried about the difference between face-to-face communication and more removed ways of talking—the letter, the telegraph, the phone. Without the traditional trappings of personal communication, like non-verbal cues, context, and tone, comments can become overly impersonal... — newyorker.com

Superpedestrian, a start-up in Boston, announced on Monday that it has received $2.1 million in financing to help build a wheel that transforms some standard bicycles into hybrid e-bikes.

The product, the Copenhagen Wheel, is a design from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology SENSEable City Laboratory. The original goal of the wheel was to entice more people to more bicycles in large cities in lieu of cars by giving them help from a motor. — New York Times

A jovial group of Red Guards bask in the golden glow of cornfields, waving their flags at the magnificent harvest, while a rustic farming couple look on, carrying an overflowing basket of perfectly plump red apples. In the centre of this vision of optimism, where once might have beamed the cheerful face of Mao, stands the twisted loop of the China Central Television (CCTV) headquarters, radiating a lilac sheen. — theguardian.com

Choosing the areas to monitor within a building can be “an art,” said Paul Gottsegen, the president of the Halstead Management Company. “You want information that is important to the security of the building"... — NYT

The intent is to save energy by controlling the temperature of an individual person, rather than an entire building, a goal that anyone who's ever turned on a personal space heater in a frigid office building in July can get behind. The team just won $10,000 from MIT's Making And Designing Materials Engineering Competition, which the inventors will use to improve the prototype and the algorithms that automate the pulses. — popsci.com

The round tables at Starbucks were the result of asking the question how do we want people to feel before considering what do we want them to do...Form follows feeling. — Medium