Architecture as Design Cognition: Synthetic Intelligence, Aesthetic Judgment, and the Operative Turn

This paper proposes design cognition as a conceptualframework for understanding architecture in the age of synthetic intelligence.Rather than framing artificial intelligence in terms of automation,efficiency, or authorship, it argues that architecture is undergoing adeeper epistemic shift: from a representational discipline to an operativecognitive practice. What is at stake is not the adoption of new tools, buta reorganisation of where and how architectural thinking itself occurs.Design cognition emerges neither within a singular human subject norinside computational systems alone, but through distributed cognitiveecologies composed of human judgment, synthetic representations, materialbehaviours, and environmental processes. Drawing on computationtheory, philosophy of mind, and the Agentic Architecture projectexhibited at the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale, the paper reframescreativity as the navigation of high-dimensional possibility spaces ratherthan expressive authorship. It introduces aesthetic cognition as an irreduciblearchitectural capacity: an ability to perceive, project, and evaluatespatial futures that cannot be fully formalised or automated. By situatingarchitecture within multi-scalar planetary systems, it argues that designbecomes an epistemic actor capable of participating in the recomputationof material, energetic, and informational relations.