Prof Nabs Coveted Architecture Award

Alina A. Payne has become the first Harvard professor to win Germany’s Max Planck Research Award in the humanities for her contribution to the study of architecture.

Payne, professor of history of art and architecture, focuses her research on architecture in the Renaissance, Baroque, and modern era.

But she does more than look at the buildings and monuments, said Frank Fehrenbach, also professor of history of art and architecture.

“Many people focus on the buildings of an epoch, but she is also interested in theory,” he said. “There are not so many [people] working on that, especially in Italian Renaissance architecture.”

The Planck award not only honors Payne’s accomplishments but recognizes her for her potential, he added.

The Max Planck Society selects two scholars each year for this award—one German and one not—with an eye toward the future, according to the society’s website.

The society seeks a winner “from whom continued high-caliber scientific work can be expected in the context of an international cooperation.”

Winners receive a 750,000-Euro prize intended to fund future research.

Payne said her upcoming book, “Modern Architecture and the Rise of a Theory of Objects,” will look at buildings and monuments from the mid-nineteenth and twentieth centuries, focusing on the German-speaking world including Germany, Austria, and Switzerland.

Although she wrote about the Renaissance and Baroque periods in Italy for her first book, she said she has always studied both early modern and modern architecture.

Payne looks at architecture “in the context of its own time—how it relates to culture, the sciences, and literary art,” she said.

And currently, this “context” includes religion.

Payne is the general editor for an upcoming encyclopedia on world religious architecture. The volume will look at architecture in relation to the history of religion, history of rituals, and objects, which are often used for inspiration.

Objects, she said, “while not architecture in themselves, can be seen as a bridge to architecture.”

Payne is the first Harvard humanities professor to win the Planck award and the first University professor to win it in 12 years.

The three previous Harvard recipients were honored in the fields of bioscience and medicine between 1990 and 1994, when the award was given to 12 scholars a year.

Payne was first notified of her nomination once she won, making the Planck award different from the Nobel Prize, for which contenders often promote themselves as candidates.

“The first I heard about [my nomination],” she said, “was when they called me up to ask if I would accept it.”