GeoffreyC:
It's not accurate to say: "For some unknown reason Hanse and Kittleman did not get the bunker restoration job at Merion", because they did get the job and later lost the job after restoring a number of bunkers.
The reasons they lost the job are complex, to say the least, and probably involve a number of factors some of which may not strictly involve golf architecture.
There were timing issues, probably a number of interrelated maintenance issues, probably some old personal dynamics, possibly some friction between architect and contractor, and some membership dissatisfaction with the way some of the Hanse restored bunkers were playing, as well as an initial missunderstanding concerning architectural attribution that involved an unfortunate listing by Ron Whitten that may not have been inspired by who it was believed to have been inspired by (or maybe I should say condoned by) and ultimately was "untakebackable", if you know what I mean.
Consequently, Merion began to look elsewhere and my understanding is they attempted to reach out to Coore & Crenshaw but for one reason or another C&C and Merion did not connect on the bunker project. In fairness to both C&C and Merion, C&C was probably out of the restoration business by then.
Merion then hired Tom Fazio to work with the contractor who had been hired simultaneous with Hanse and Kittleman. This is MacDonald & Co from Maryland, who most know are doing a ton of bunker restorations including US Open preparations.
The ultimate issue, involving many of these parties, as I understand it, was the actual nature and condition of Merion's bunkers PRIOR to any of this restoration project. It was basically a matter of two people looking at the same thing and one seeing one thing and the other seeing something entirely different, in my opinion.
One faction believed Merion's bunkers were falling apart and the other faction likely thought the evolutionary, forever hand-repaired, rugged and scraggly look of them was beautiful and unique--the essence of their character, so to speak.
There is no doubt that Merion's bunkers did need some serious work. They needed their drainage repaired and restored and they needed to be resanded. The $64,000 question, though, was did they really need to have their edges, particularly their top edges and their profiles, surrounds, grasses and evolutionary details reworked or totally reworked?
The various parties seemed to be in disagreement over this and ultimately the club decided to totally rework the bunkers. In fairness to Merion they were not trying to change the look of their famous bunkers, they were only trying to repair them.
And this is where restoration PLANNING and RESEARCH, decision making and processing gets really complicated, particularly if you are dealing with bunkers as famous and complex as Merion's.
Those interested in this subject must understand that there is a certain amount of design and construction latitude if you are restoring and reworking the bunkers of Gulph Mills or even Aronomink and certainly many other courses. But when you are doing these things with the "White Faces of Merion" and you want to preserve their detail and ageless character there is probably no latitude at all!
I believe to really get the job done well, provided you have made the decision to do it at all (which could be separately debated), you have to try to pull in the best of the best for this kind of thing. It should not take you long in the researching of a project like this to realize that most architects and contractors are probably not interchangeable for this type of complicated project!
My personal feeling is you should commit to throw out things like any committee assumptions of any kind going into the research part of it and start to filter through the knowledge and information of the conoisseurs and artistes in the world of golf architecture and restoration architecture.
I would have started by bringing in Geoff Shackelford to analyze aerial and photographic material. You can't believe the things he can find in classic course aerials that can lead to interesting and valid conclusions. The most valuable thing a guy like Shackelford knows about the value of historic aerials is not just what you can see from the air but what you never can see!! That aerials from about 3,000ft can show you a lot but the best they can do is two dimensions! And this is where a guy like Kye Goalby (and certainly Hanse, Kittleman, Hine, C&C, Doak, Forse and some others) can translate the look on the ground into the necessary three dimensions and the necessary detail.
This is when you start to go from ordinary top profile straight horizontal lines and ordinary, rounded and matching ground level vertical lines to something that looks like nature actually made it or evolved it. This is where you need to get the real bunker making artistes involved to do the dirt work instead of some contractor employees riding around on little mechanized equipment that tends to just smooth things out! And this is how you're going to get real character and quality that unfortunately even good historic aerials have a hard time catching!
This is when good research, willingness to dispense with simple and easy assumptions, an open mind and good people pay off!
It's possible I wouldn't be saying any of this about Merion if I wasn't able to have an honest and open dialogue with Bill Greenwood, the Chairman of the Merion Green Committee. It's about the fourth time I've mentioned it but I feel that anyone who is interested in this subject on this website should take the time to understand the facts and complexity of the Merion bunker project and also to be civil to Greenwood and his committee. If you care at all about the bunkers there shouldn't be any other way.
That's the architectural and more technical side of the bunker project, but the other side of the coin is the process side! And this is really for you TommyN. I know you and you're my friend but you just have to start to understand a little better that side of these restoration projects. A guy like Bill Greenwood cares a lot about Merion and he wants to do the right thing and if he makes a mistake I feel confident he would admit it. If he's going in the wrong direction and somebody can point out to him why that is he would change directions and go in the right direction if he could.
What you don't really understand is he has always had an active and opinionated membership like most of us involved in projects like this and that has to be dealt with as well or better than the architectural project. There just isn't any way around it unless you are John Arthur Brown at Pine Valley but Bill Greenwood is not JAB and Merion is not PVGC by a long shot! There have been Green Chairmen who did things for dumb and personal reasons but Greenwood isn't one of those. He probably has five hundred members with two hundred and fifty different opinons and he has to deal with that somehow and build some kind of a consensus or things could likely get really screwed up.
So please Tommy and some of the others, at least admit that you have some understanding of the process and what it means to the final product. I know that if a guy like Ed Baker reads this he's going to agree with what I'm saying. You've got all the passion in the world about classic architecture and classic courses but if you don't understand that you have to deal with the memberships, you've got to respect them or at least act like you do, then all the passion in the world will not help you much. You can get all your passionate guns blazing but if you don't understand the process they will shoot you down every time!
There are some other good things coming out of Merion so be supportive and help out.
This could be my longest post yet, it's way too blunt and I should probably just clear it but I have my finger on the submit button, so here it goes...