Metropolis Magazine – Next Generation® Winner: Wind Turbines on Electrical Towers
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“New York, May 19th, 2009 — A French team of an engineer and two architects have won this year’s prestigious Metropolis Next Generation® Design Prize for “Wind-it,” a design to place wind turbines inside existing high-voltage electricity pylons. The winners are Julien Choppin, 31, and Nicola Delon, 31, partners in the Paris architecture firm Encore Heureux, and Raphaël Ménard, 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 Raphaël Ménard have combined technical authority with design imagination that is audaciously simple.”
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(Source: Eve Dilworth and Kimberly Taylor, Metropolis Magazine)