Max Planck Society - Press Release

News FP / 2006 (24)

March 6th, 2006

The Max Planck Research Award goes to Alina Payne and Horst Bredekamp

Cutting-edge art-history research is recognised with 1.5 million euros

The Max Planck Research Award, an international prize from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and the Max Planck Society, is awarded this year to Harvard Art History and Architecture Professor Alina Payne and Professor Horst Bredekamp at Humboldt University in Berlin. The award comes with a 1.5 million euro grant and each year recognises one German, and one non-German researcher, both of whom show outstanding work involving international co-operation.

Federal Education and Research Minister Annette Schavan is scheduled to present the Max Planck Research Award at the annual General Meeting of the Max Planck Society on July 13, 2006 in Frankfurt. The Ministry finances the award and presents it along with the Max Planck Society and Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. The prize encourages innovation among German and international researchers; it is awarded each year on a rotating basis to the natural sciences and engineering, life sciences, and humanities.

Professor Alina Payne is recognised above all for her many groundbreaking publications. After studying architecture, she moved to the field of art history and is now considered a leading theorist of renaissance architecture. She has been a model of interdisciplinary research, spanning the areas of science and art history - particularly historiography and the history of architecture and design. A true cosmopolitan, she speaks five languages and reads Latin fluently. Her projects have allowed her to build an international academic network, which the Max Planck Research Award will help even further to cement.

Professor Horst Bredekamp is an inspiring and visionary personality. He reached a large public audience at Humboldt University in 2000 with his exhibition "Theatrum naturae et artis", which spanned the last four centuries. His specialty involves the problems of depicting and using new technologies; his wide-ranging research deals with topics from medieval to contemporary art. Some of his themes include clocks as world models, "bio-pictures", architecture software, and world models which go beyond normal imaginative capabilities, like a curved universe. His projects have been described as ground-breaking and interdisciplinary. The Max Planck Research Award now enables him, as well as Professor Payne, to engage in, deepen, and expand international co-operation.

Since 2004, the Max Planck Research Award has been awarded with a grant of 1.5 million euros. In that year it went to bioinformatics researchers Professor Eugene Myers, University of California, Berkeley, and Professor Martin Vingron, of the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics in Berlin. In 2005 the prize was given to astrophysicists Dr. Christopher Carilli of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory Socorro and Professor Christof Wetterich of Ruprecht-Karl University of Heidelberg.

Editor’s note: A wide range of background information, radio material and broadcast footage will be made available before the presentation of the Max Planck Research Award on July 13, 2006.

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