I know I shouldn't say this but if you stepped onto a piece of natural ground such as the Sand Hills before it was the Sand Hills G.C. or TOC before man-made architecture on it, do you think all the natural sand dunsy/ bunker type stuff was all arranged in the exact places where it's strategically significant to a golfer? Did it ever occur to you Nature itself may not have arranged that dunsy/bunker type stuff for the golfer?
We all know the sand bunker is and has been for a hundred and more years perhaps any architect’s best expression for creating golf strategy but if an architect were to place bunkers in some places of no significance whatsoever to golf does that have to be labeled eye-candy, and if so why?
Max Behr sometimes talked about completely natural golf, what he occasionally referred to as “Wild Golf”. That was golf played across raw land and natural landforms almost completely unenhanced by man or architects for golf. I call that kind of raw golf “path of least resistance golf”. This was basically the way golf was in the Scottish linkland for hundreds of years before man-made architecture began.
What if a golfer playing “Wild Golf” decided to tee off at some convenient spot to go from point A to B to C etc, and there was a natural sand dunsy/bunker type thing 20 yards in front of him to the right or 352 yards way out to his left well away from the course he proposed to take? Are those random sandy dunsy/bunker things eye-candy? Is that Nature’s “eye candy” for golf? Hardly, since I’m sure Nature couldn’t care less about golf or golfers but they sure needed and utilized her randomness for hundreds of years however she arranged it.
This is what I probably shouldn’t mention because most on here might take it all wrong somehow but because Coore & Crenshaw were mentioned in the initial post as was Cuscowilla and the relevance for golf and strategy of some of their bunkers, I will mention it. I was talking to the man himself a few days ago and I asked him if there was anything he could think of he and Ben would like to do someday that they felt they’d never found the place or the client to do? He said; “Like What?”
Since I wasn’t exactly ready to be asked that question, I said, “Like maybe going bunkerless”. He said, no there really wasn’t anything he could think of they’d really been waiting to do and he said he felt that bunkering was probably one of three of the most important things in golf architecture. Then I’m pretty sure he said he’d like to experiment or experiment more with bunkering in a truly random fashion. I take that to mean like how those natural sand dunsy/things are arranged in and by Nature herself that don’t necessarily conform to some formulaic or even strategic arrangement for golf or to satisfy the “game minds” of golfers. Maybe when some architects do that sort of thing it’s more to sort of tie an entire site together with random bunkering in some natural looking random arrangement just like Nature itself does or once did on the linksland or in the Sand Hills and not for the necessary benefit of golf and golfers.
If you look around Applebrook, perhaps Pac Dunes, or Cuscowilla or French Creek or Stonewall North or many of the other recent courses of these architects who seem to be trying to launch back into forms of naturalness and perhaps real randomness you’re very likely to see bunkers and funny little things they made in places that seem to have no relevance to golf or to the apparently formulaic structure of what golf architecture is supposed to accomplish solely for a golfer's benefit. Is all that eye candy? The more interesting question is should that sort of thing be considered conforming to or departing from some of the "Art Principles" or landscape architecture principles that have been drapped around the neck of golf course architecture for so long? Well call it that if you want to but I know Nature couldn’t care less and I’m beginning to think Bill Coore couldn’t either.
And then I launched into Max Behr and his entire philosophy of naturalness and even randomness and things like his opposition to “the game mind of man” and Bill said he was starting to get late and he had to go but that we’d talk about that again sometime!
