Lecturer
Dason Whitsett is Chief Design Officer of Frame Hospitality Group. He is a Certified Passive House Consultant, NCARB Certificate holder, and is licensed as an architect in Texas and California. He has taught in the School of Architecture since 2005 focusing on technical courses while maintaining a qualitative perspective on their significance and potential to enable delight.
His professional and academic interests are diverse, but center on energy performance, thermal comfort, materiality and construction methodologies—all in service to the creation of great places for humans. This has led to an array of professional endeavors expanding beyond the traditional boundaries of architecture, including building performance analysis and consulting, design-build project delivery, and offsite manufacturing. Building energy simulation is an expertise used throughout his work and teaching. He has extensive experience in modular building, design for manufacturing, and factory operations and was previously Principle Architect for Kasita, a prefabricated microhousing startup.
Dason’s Frame Hotel-SoCo project was selected as the Best Hotel in Austin Monthly’s Readers Choice Awards for 2025. His work has received awards from organizations including Architizer A+, AIA California, Texas Society of Architects, the inaugural Savings by Design Energy Efficiency Integration Award, and others. It has been published in dozens of trade publications and popular press articles.
Whitsett co-authored a book with Matt Fajkus, titled Architectural Science and the Sun, published by Routledge in 2018, as well as co-authoring the first edition of Introduction to Architectural Technology from Laurence King Publishers in 2008.
Dason has Bachelor of Architecture (1995) and Master of Science in Sustainable Design (2005) degrees from UT Austin.
