Niklas Maak studied Art History, Architecture and Philosophy in Hamburg and Paris, where he was a student of Jacques Derrida, and is editor and head of the art and architecture section of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, as well as a professor at the Städelschule in Frankfurt and Harvard University. His work includes numerous essays on architecture, the city and housing, and has been recognised with awards such as the George F. Kennan Award for Architectural Criticism (2009), the Henri Nannen Prize for Journalism (2012) and the Johann Heinrich Merck Essay Prize (2022). His essay Server Manifesto: Data Center Architecture and the Future of Democracy (2022) inspired Technophoria, his first novel, published in Spanish in 2024.