‘Soft Embodied Architectures’ is a practice-based investigation that explores the use of embodied design ideation (EDI) methods within the context of textile architecture. The expression ‘textile architecture’ comprises a wide and varied range of projects that make use of textile materials for architectural design in various ways. EDI methods have proved to be successful in eliciting meaningful knowledge during the early phases of the design process. While EDI methods have been widely used in other fields such as interaction design, fashion design, and product design, there are fewer examples of these within the context of textile architecture. Consequently, this investigation sought to find out how EDI methods could contribute to creating new ways of ideating textile architecture. Through four collaborative experiments, the spatial potential of textiles was explored by means of body-material interactions and mapped out into the digital realm. By collaborating with dancers, choreographers, embodied interaction designers and architects, the notions of embodiment, materiality, and choreography were explored in relation to the creation of nuanced spatial expressions such as dynamic soft volumes, elastic spaces and soft envelopes. This investigation acknowledges the agency of the material, the body and the context, and develops a hybrid EDI process that combines embodied explorations with motion capture technology. The findings show that by exploring spatial opportunities through body-material interactions, soft body-space entities emerged. Such entities offer a nuanced understanding of space, in which the material, the bodies and the context co-shape the architectural form through the experience. By digitally capturing this coshaping process, raw geometries were obtained and explored to expand the design possibilities of a soft and embodied architecture. A hybrid EDI process such as this offers a new way of ideating soft embodied architecture by collectively folding, deforming and ‘layering up’ soft material on and around human bodies, providing embodied and digital outputs that can be combined and used as insights for designing soft embodied architecture.