Niklas Maak is a German writer, the architecture critic of Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, and a Guest Professor of Fine Arts and Architecture at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste–Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main. He studied Art History, Philosophy, Law, and Architecture in Hamburg and Paris. He graduated in 1998, and holds a PhD in Art History / Philosophy. Since 2001, Maak has pursued parallel careers as an educator and writer.

From 2014 on, he has taught at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, and he served as a co-curator to Rem Koolhaas’ show “Countryside: The Future” at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, in 2020. Maak is the author of several books, among them Le Corbusier: The Architect on the beach, Living Complex: From Zombie City to the New Communal, and Eurotopians: Fragments of a Different Future, as well as of two novels, Fahrtenbuch and Technophoria; Technophoria is currently being translated and adapted as a TV series. He has received numerous awards for his work, among them the George F. Kennan Prize, the Henri-Nannen-Prize, and the Bund Deutscher Architekten Prize. Maak’s last book Server Manifesto: The Architecture of the Data Center and the Future of Democracy (Hatje Cantz Publishers, 2022) focuses on questions of data ownership, digital sovereignity, and urbanism in the age of digitalization.