Joseph Wheeler

Joe Wheeler is a professor of architecture at Virginia Tech, co-director of the university’s Center for Design Research, and a globally recognized innovator in the areas of housing industrialization, environmental sustainability, and technology integration.

As leader of Virginia Tech’s FutureHAUS project, Wheeler has spent two decades helping student researchers and industry, government, and academic partners explore solutions to the world’s global housing challenges. Through FutureHAUS projects, Wheeler guides students in applied research that also engages industry partners in how to make homes more smart, efficient, affordable, and sustainable to meet the needs of the world’s diverse, fast-growing population.

His areas of expertise include smart home technology; the use of modular and industrialized processes in homebuilding; energy efficiency and green innovation in homebuilding; housing accessibility for diverse age groups and aging populations; and the engineering of “flex spaces” for smaller homes that still deliver on occupants’ needs. Wheeler’s teaching and research has long focused on the areas of environmental and sustainable design. He has lead Virginia Tech’s interdisciplinary Solar Decathlon projects in 2005, 2009 and 2010 and 2018 to build the world’s best solar home. The 2010 Virginia Tech entry, Lumenhaus, won first place overall in the international competition in Madrid, Spain, as well as the first national Honor Award for a university from the American Institute of Architects. Most recently, further validating his future building concept, his FutureHAUS Dubai won first place overall in the 2018 Solar Decathlon Middle East.

In 2016 he received the HIVE 100 Award as one of the top innovators in housing in the country by Builder Magazine. Other awards include a national design honor award from the AIA, the NCARB Prize for creative collaboration between the academy and the profession, the Virginia Society AIA Research Prize, and the Xcaliber University Prize for Excellence in Outreach. He has offered testimony before Congress regarding national energy issues and worked with U.S. international government agencies on issues of sustainability, affordable housing, disaster relief, and modular construction.

The FutureHAUS, after its successful performance in the Solar Decathlon Middle East in 2018 and its subsequent exhibitions in Times Square New York and Washington DC in 2019., was most recently featured at World EXPO (2021-22) in Dubai, UAE for a six month exhibition where the house received over one million visitors.