What Type of "Restoration" ?

[Patrick Hitt]

Let's suppose that you are at an old club that was designed by one of the lesser known early architects and you wished to begin working towards a restoration - or an attempt to clean up years of piece meal work by well meaning green committees.  Your course does not have any old plans or drawings due to fire or other circumstances and the local photograghers never got around to snapping any details from the ground or above.  If you are an architect - or a green chairman, what is restoration, and what is sympathetic restoration or "restoration of traditional shot values" ? When does the restoration become educated guesswork versus recreating a look or even specific bunker drawings ala Aronimink ?

[TEPaul]

PatrickH:

This is a good question you're asking--"What type of restoration?"

With the kind of course you're describing a better place to start might be to consider Tom Doak's general advice that maybe the golf course (originally) is not very worthy of restoration.

Doak would have to come back on here and explain that but my recollection of what he once said on here about that is maybe up to 90% or more of the old courses out there are not really worthy of restoration.

But after considering that maybe the best place to start (with the facts you've given us) would be to just redo the golf course to be the best it can be with maybe not much more than a bit of the "flair" of the original designer--sort of the "look" of the original era, not necessarily the exact details--if you know what I mean!

If you have no photos, no plans, nothing, from back then I can't really see there would be any other way to do it!

As Ron Prichard tried to stress on the Aronimink threads, this kind of thing often takes some very good "interpretation" on the part of the architect--whether he's called a restoration architect or something else.

[TEPaul]

I think I'd also offer the caveat when it comes to restoration to analyze closely even the restoration of certain holes of well known architects.

The first thing to try to determine is exactly why an original  hole may have been changed or redesigned, even if the orginal hole of a famous architect.

At my course (Ross) there were clearly three original holes that were just not working well for the membership. They had been in play for anywhere from 15-20 years and weren't good holes or weren't working well at all. Those holes were redesigned by another architect (a very good one) and have subsequently (for the last 70+ years) been good to very good holes for our membership.

We all have to recognize that even the best architects sometimes made mistakes and to restore something that was clearly redone for a very valid reason would be both recreating an initial mistake and compounding problems as well.

[Ed_Baker]

Patrick,

What you are actually exploring here is a renovation,which is fine, but with out some documentation of what was there originally, it would be difficult to even identify what changes have been made.

I think a lot of the older less noteworthy courses are reacting to the "renovation" movement for the same reasons that the more well known clubs have, tree problems,turf quality,bunker erosion and migration, with a little bit of the "keep up with the Joneses" mentality.

The ultimate success of any of these projects is to have clearly defined, specific goals, at the outset, that the majority of members understand and support. Even the best Master Plans have a lot of "concepts" that must be turned in to reality and somewhere along the line personal agenda rears it's ugly head and the architect is caught in the middle again.

[Patrick_Mucci]

Patrick,

I would seek those individuals who have been members for 50 or more years, to see if collectively, I could piece together the changes that occured over the last 50 or more years.

It's a begining.

[RJ_Daley]

Since you state there are years of piece meal work, and it is hard to get the flavor of the original course's shot values and playing style and look, I would first ask myself, how much room do you have to do stylistic "imitation", if you at least know if the original archie had a particularly consistent style that is desirable to bring back.  It seems to me that the first thing to estimating how much room you have to do some restoration, is to imagine what the property looked like when it was first presented to the archie.  Usually that involves imagining it with far fewer trees.  Then see if there needs to be a big time tree trimming to get the area of hole corridors to where they were when the design was first conceived.  Did the archie intend to plant trees to give it a framed look, did he already have them, or did he never want them?

Once you figure out if you have the space I think you have to get one of the specialist archies to creatively imitate since you say nothing of pictures or documentation exists to prove the style and shapes exactly. The main key in my mind is whatever you do, make it consistent throughout all of the holes and get rid of the piecemeal appearance.  

[Patrick Hitt]

Thanks, as always, for the candid replies.

I guess I would call a project like this a sympathetic renovation or the attempt to make a course look like Michael Jackson before all the surgery renovation.
Chicago, like many cities, is littered with courses that have been renovated out of existence. We need Tom Paul and a bunch of archaeologists out here armed with soil probes and farm census aerials to find the last remnants of our old architecture. How else am I going to be able to tell the difference between the Tweedie and Foulis bunkers ?

The Flossmoor course is a good example of a Tweedie course here that has lost it's way - especially on the front side.