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

Summary/Abstract: This paper proposes design cognition as a conceptual framework 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 a deeper epistemic shift: from a representational discipline to an operative cognitive practice. What is at stake is not the adoption of new tools, but a reorganisation of where and how architectural thinking itself occurs. Design cognition emerges neither within a singular human subject nor inside computational systems alone, but through distributed cognitive ecologies composed of human judgment, synthetic representations, material behaviours, and environmental processes. Drawing on computation theory, philosophy of mind, and the Agentic Architecture project exhibited at the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale, the paper reframes creativity as the navigation of high-dimensional possibility spaces rather than expressive authorship. It introduces aesthetic cognition as an irreducible architectural capacity: an ability to perceive, project, and evaluate spatial futures that cannot be fully formalised or automated. By situating architecture within multi-scalar planetary systems, it argues that design becomes an epistemic actor capable of participating in the recomputation of material, energetic, and informational relations.

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