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This is a uniquely subtle and compelling study of the human relation to technology. It quietly and insightfully threads itself through multiple disciplines to offer a truly transformative analysis of the ubiquitous yet elusive interface without which neither human nor technology can be thought. -- Mark Wigley, Columbia University, author of White Walls, Designer Dresses: The Fashioning of Modern Architecture "A theory of the interface is a theory of culture." When interaction design becomes the liberal art of the age, the origins of interface become worth sounding. Deep below the surface, in a book whose very topic is surface, Branden Hookway has found something very different from the usual Silicon Valley origin myths, more ancient than Maxwell's daemon, more numinous than a luminous screen, and more ubiquitous lately than anything you might think of as technological apparatus. If, like Agamben, you seek immunity to the tech lords' sovereignty, you might try a jump into this fresh metaphysical read. -- Malcolm McCullough, Professor of Architecture, Taubman College, University of Michigan, and author of Ambient Commons: Attention in the Age of Embodied Information Against its startling ubiquity in our contemporary experience of space, architecture has lacked a robust theoretical framework to engage the interface. No longer. From epistemological origins in the fluid science of the nineteenth century, through the military-industrial forges of the twentieth, to its proliferation in our own, uncertain time, Branden Hookway's bravura Interface provides an essential guide to this most ineffable of landscapes. -- Nicholas de Monchaux, Associate Professor of Architecture and Urban Design, University of California, Berkeley, and author of Spacesuit: Fashioning Apollo

About the Author

Branden Hookway teaches in the Department of Architecture and the Department of Design and Environmental Analysis at Cornell University. He is author of Pandemonium- The Rise of Predatory Locales in the Postwar World.