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On the Record with Virginia Tech: Joe Wheeler

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Virginia Tech faculty and students are designing the home of the future – one completely powered by solar energy, loaded with smart technology, responsive to voice commands, and built in a factory to fit your budget and lifestyle needs. From homes and condos to hospitals, hotels, and disaster relief shelters, smart building design is attracting interest from world-leading architecture firms, consumer brand, and foreign and domestic governments.
 
Join us for an early preview and discussion with Virginia Tech architecture Professor Joe Wheeler about how this innovative “cartridge concept” housing is a practical and affordable solution to meeting the growing world population and climate change crisis. Virginia Tech’s research team is bringing it all together in FutureHAUS Dubai -- a prototype for the future of sustainable, smart housing -- which will take the world stage at the U.S. Department of Energy’s international Solar Decathlon Middle East competition in Dubai this November. As the only U.S. collegiate team competing in this year’s solar decathlon, Virginia Tech hopes to repeat its 2010 global victory in Spain.

About Joe 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 over a decade helping student researchers and industry, government, and academic partners explore solutions to the world’s global housing challenges. His area of expertise includes homebuilding projects related to industrialized processes, modular construction, energy efficiency, and smart home technology.

Additional background
The Solar Decathlon is a 10-day competition, created by the U.S. Department of Energy as a way to enlist university students and faculty worldwide in solar housing research. The 2018 contest hosted in Dubai presents the added challenge of designing a home that withstands the city’s heat, dust, and humidity. Following its 2010 solar decathlon win, the team continued its research and built a prototype FutureHaus. FutureHAUS, unveiled room by room over five years in international trade shows, burned in a fire in February. It was just one month after the team completed the full suite of components for the home. Wheeler said FutureHAUS Dubai is the next generation of FutureHAUS and LumenHAUS, merging the best features of both.

On the Record events are a series of regular media roundtables hosted by the university’s Media Relations team with a goal of elevating Virginia Tech research and connecting faculty to reporters from national and trade publications.
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