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Abstract
This thesis explores how the historic textile practice of smocking can be reimagined as an architectural strategy for creating soft, adaptive, and participatory space. Smocking’s potential is examined through physical tests at varying scales and the development of a custom digital tool that simulates smocking behaviors to support rapid prototyping and material efficiency. Merging craft and computation, this hybrid method enables new aesthetic and structural possibilities while foregrounding collective making. Workshops and community collaborations activate smocking’s social dimension, situating it within a broader feminist framework that values softness, flexibility, and distributed authorship. Through this work, smocking is reframed not as decorative embellishment but as a scalable design system—responsive, inclusive, and materially intelligent—capable of challenging architectural norms and expanding the role of textile logic in shaping the built environment.
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