The winners are Julien Choppin, 31, and Nicola Delon, 31, partners in the Paris architecture firm Encore Heureux, and Raphael Menard, director of Elioth, a 20-person conceptual and experimental research arm of the large French engineering firm Iosis Group.

The first non-US winners of the prize, Choppin, Delon and Menard were judged to have best met the 2009 Next Generation Prize Challenge: "FIX OUR ENERGY ADDICTION."

The winners were honored by the architecture and design community at an awards ceremony last night at the Herman Miller showroom in New York. The 2009 Next Generation Design Competition is supported by sponsors ASSA ABLOY, Herman Miller, and Sherwin-Williams. The prize carries an award of $10,000, which was presented to the team.

Wind-it answers one of the greatest challenges to the development of wind power: where to site wind turbines. Choppin, Delon and Menard's design uses existing infrastructure - the towers and pylons that dot the more than 157,000 miles of high voltage power lines in the U.S. - to locate their turbines, which can be stacked within already sited structures.

Moreover, Wind-it solves the problem of linking energy generation and electricity transmission in the same way - by co-locating them.

"Wind power is great in theory, but NIMBY concerns have hampered its deployment. I'm proud that our Next Generation Prize winner provides such an elegant solution to a thorny problem," said Metropolis publisher Horace Havemeyer III.

"Julien Choppin, Nicola Delon, and Raphael Menard have combined technical authority with design imagination that is audaciously simple."

"The team that created Wind-it exemplifies the best of what designers can do when they turn their attention to the issues of sustainability and clean energy, says Metropolis editor in chief Susan S. Szenasy.

"When presented with the challenge to 'FIX OUR ENERGY ADDICTION,' the design community responded with entries that were inventive, profound, knowledgeable and imaginative. The design community has an important role to play in the reconstruction of our planet."

The judges for the 2009 competition were Valerie Fletcher, Executive Director of the Institute for Human Centered Design, Boston; Eileen Jones, Principal and National Discipline Leader for Perkins+Will | Eva Maddox Branded Environments; Brandon Mitchell, Director of Development of Full Spectrum, a sustainable real estate development company in Harlem; Alexandros E. Washburn, AIA, Chief Urban Designer of the City of New York, Department of City Planning; and Philip White, Principal of Orb Analysis for Design, Vice President of Sustainable Minds, and Assistant Professor at Arizona State University College of Design and School of Sustainability. Szenasy moderated the deliberations.

"This seemingly simple proposal demonstrates genius on two levels: it significantly reduces wind turbine costs by using the extensive network of existing electricity distribution poles, while also overcoming many of the legal obstacles to sighting and constructing new wind turbine systems," notes competition judge, Philip White.

"The genius of the proposal is that it solved probably the biggest issue of wind production," says Alexandros Washburn, New York's chief urban designer and a judge for the Next Generation competition, "which is where to locate these very large structures. By incorporating them into transmission towers, which are already located and of the same scale as wind towers, the idea of how it looks on the landscape is very cleverly integrated."

Created by Metropolis magazine in 2003, the annual Next Generation Design Competition, now in its sixth year, recognizes outstanding ideas from young architects and designers for making our built environment better, safer and more sustainable. This year, entrants were asked to submit proposals relating to energy. See full coverage in the May Issue of Metropolis.

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