Nahal Mohtashemi

2017 Fellow

Nahal Mohtashemi was born in California and raised in Tehran, Iran. She received her Master of Architecture degree from the USC School of Architecture in 2018, and is currently a designer at Piechota Architecture in San Francisco.

Nahal has a background of studying and working in the Middle East. She has also worked as an architectural intern in Shanghai, China. Nahal is interested in exploring simple geometries as a basis for generative form-finding. She begins a design by first understanding simple geometrical relationships that later result in complexity in function, hierarchy, structure, and aesthetics. Nahal iwas part of the USC graduate studio program advised by Jose Sanchez in which architecture and design are approached through the medium of games. In this way social, cultural, urban, geometrical, and formal principals can be understood through the lens of game design. 

Nahal works across a variety of disciplines. Her projects range in scale from urbanism to furniture design while constantly reconsidering the shared commonalities between the two.