[TEPaul]

.....was dedicatedly removed from the practice of golf course architecture?

Andrew Balackshin's thread on "design styles" got me thinking about that, although it is a subject that's been on my mind for years.

I wonder if, at this point, any golf course architect can even contemplate what that could or would mean.

I suppose the fundamental thought in this kind of question should be---Is Nature itself the fundamental essence and creator of "landscape architecture" as we think of it, or is Man himself the fundamental creator of "landscape architecture" (as we think of it)?

Has Landscape architecture, particularly as it applies to golf course architecture, become too much an "idealized" form or vision of Nature?

I should remind you that the basic "principles" of landscape architecture (as it seems to be precieved by Man) are Harmony, Proportion, Balance, Rhythm and Emphasis.

For instance, do you think Mother Nature (whoever she might be ) views "landscape architecture" the same way a Tom Fazio does?

Do you think Mother Nature intended the landscape architecture principle of "Emphasis" to be where any golfer's eye should be directed and where any golfer SHOULD hit the ball? Should all golf course architects intend that?  

And what about this thing Man and the greatest of landscape architects called the 'imperfections of Nature'? Should they really be removed from golf course architecture as they have always dedicatedly been removed from "Nature" in the practice of landscape architecture?

Again, should golf course architecture be some "idealized" form of Nature as seems to be the basic essence of the art form of landscape architecture?

[Scott Witter]

Tom:

I have told myself before that I am impressed with your knowledge of landscape architecture, its history, its influence on the design styles of many things interesting and the connections to golf architecture and once again you bring a smile this morning...but if I didn't know better, I think you are trying to lure Kelly Moran back with this thread...he has a solid understanding of this subject as well and I always enjoyed his philosophical thoughts on this.  This is also why I was interested in his GCA work as he seemed determined to make a clear connection between LA and GCA...and why not!

I also suspect that you will not get too many replies on this one as I believe your concepts, while very interesting to me as an LA & GCA, may be deep for the masses here.

BTW, were you an LA in a past life, or just an eccentric, happy-go-lucky english chap who likes to dabble in countryside estate gardening?

Cheers

[Adam_F_Collins]

.....was dedicatedly removed from the practice of golf course architecture?

Has Landscape architecture, particularly as it applies to golf course architecture, become too much an "idealized" form or vision of Nature?

Again, should golf course architecture be some "idealized" form of Nature as seems to be the basic essence of the art form of landscape architecture?

Tom,

I don't think it's possible to remove the influence of LA. First of all, you'd have to identify all of the places it manifests itself, and that alone is tough.

As I have pointed out before, there is a "language" of GCA which has evolved over time, and golfers as a group are resistant to change in many ways. For instance, the average bunker is very much an abstract form which has little connection with reality anymore. Soft, mounded, rolling fairways, mowing patterns, pure white sand, flower plantings, cart paths, retaining walls, etc. have become common "visual dialect" which so many "paying customers" have come to expect, even demand. So where do you draw the line?

The other thing is that "nature" in her "natural" form, is often not so conducive to golf, or even the comfortable movements of man for that matter. Inclines can't be too steep, Distances can't be too long. Man does not like the feeling of not being able to see what's ahead. He is drawn to vistas and openness, abhorrent of blindness and restriction etc.

We have touched on this before. You seem to think that "Art Principles" are to blame for a decline in golf course architecture - and in many ways, I tend to agree with you. Where we differ is that I know that these principles have developed from a deeper place - the instincts of the human organism - and that they are deeply tied to what we (as a natural species) find beautiful. You can only get rid of so much of it - before we lack the language to appreciate the product.

A golf course simply isn't a natural structure (except through the natural creativity of the human organism) and therefore can only withstand so much "nature" before it ceases to definable as such.

So your question could be reversed: What if nature was totally removed from GCA? You might find your answer in a course like Shadow Creek... it might do just fine.

Could it be largely a question of taste?

[TEPaul]

"Tom:
I have told myself before that I am impressed with your knowledge of landscape architecture, its history, its influence on the design styles of many things interesting and the connections to golf architecture and once again you bring a smile this morning...but if I didn't know better, I think you are trying to lure Kelly Moran back with this thread...he has a solid understanding of this subject as well and I always enjoyed his philosophical thoughts on this.  This is also why I was interested in his GCA work as he seemed determined to make a clear connection between LA and GCA...and why not!"

Scott:

Has Kelly Blake Moran gone somewhere? Has he left this site for some reason? If so, I didn't know that.

I'm not sure I know what Kelly's feeling is on the connection between LA and GCA, and despite what you say about me I don't know that I know all that much about LA either, although I sure have been observing for a long, long time what may be called the "English Landscape Architecture" ideas of say a Humphrey Repton or a Capability Brown or a Gertrude Jekyll. And I certainly am interested in the philosophy of a Frederick Law Olmstead who may've coined the term landscape architect.

I don't know what Kelly's feeling is about the connection or a proper connection between LA and GCA, I only know what my basic feeling is about a connection and I've always been more than a little suspicious of it in a particular sense.

"I also suspect that you will not get too many replies on this one as I believe your concepts, while very interesting to me as an LA & GCA, may be deep for the masses here."

Maybe so, and if so I'm sorry to hear that because in my opinion what I'm talking about here just might be a very fundamental nexus which in the end just may not be all that healthy for the potential of golf course architecture in the future.

"BTW, were you an LA in a past life, or just an eccentric, happy-go-lucky english chap who likes to dabble in countryside estate gardening?"

I sure wasn't an LA in a past life but I probably am an eccentric in this one.  

In the next post I'll tell you how I look at the evolution of golf course architecture as it relates to landscape architecture and its influences---how LA may've pulled GCA out of a very bad place generally in the latter part of the 19th century only to lead much of it down perhaps wrong road beginning after WW2.

I feel that the thing that got lost in the evolution is exactly how real Nature (the unidealized type) may've been lost in the transition when most everyone failed to realize that it too could be used well in golf course architecture.

What is that "unidealized" aspect of real Nature that could perhaps be used or used more? That is the real question, I suppose. Some may even call it "quirk"----some may even call some aspects of it ugly or not particularly functional for the playing of the game of golf, because of perceptions of unfairness or whatever.

I guess the question is---does Nature care what Man thinks golf is supposed to be?

It seems to me that once upon a time Man understood that that didn't even matter----that he just had to use her pretty much just as she was---eg warts and all, if you will.

That was during that time when golfers played golf across Nature in what may be referred to as paths of least resistance because he had no ability to change things. Perhaps the thought never occured to him. That was when golf was in that state that Behr referred to as 'its innocence' before it and its meaning was subjected to constant scrutiny by Man in Man's attempt to find his own meaning, his own definitions etc in it.

I'm not saying we need to go back to conditions that were obviously as rudimentary as those times but in an actual architectural sense perhaps we could in some ways---and maybe in more ways than we now realize because of our apparently constant dependence on the influences of LA in GCA in the last 50-100 years.

[Adam_F_Collins]

And aren't there a number of influences in Landscape Architecture which might be closer to what you hope to see in GCA - influences from some of the Far Eastern landscape philosophies, such as the Chinese Scholar's Garden or the Zen Buddhist Garden? I would imagine that some of those philosophies would not be so far from your own views of beauty in GCA.

The most notable effects LA on Golf may have come more from the grande scale works of the 18th Century Landscape Gardens of Brown, etc. Maybe because of scale, maybe because of geography. But golf courses are landform manipulations of one sort or another and always have been - to a greater or lesser degree. It would be crazy to imagine that the other landscaping endeavors would not influence them in some way. It seems that those developed during the 1700's are most distressing to you- when they developed the concepts of the "pastoral" landscape.

"Harmony, Proportion, Balance, Rhythm and Emphasis"

You keep coming back to these. But is that all that LA stands on? Is that all it is? Those five simple ideas? And aren't these five pretty loose in how they might be interpreted. I can tell you as a Design teacher - people would produce a pretty wide variety of objects if I asked ten of them to demonstrate Harmony, Proportion, Balance, Rhythm and Emphasis. Because - what do they mean? To some, "Balance" means symmetry. To some, Rhythm means "evenness". It's pretty broad.

These are more "areas of study" than "rules" or "directives". Are they so responsible for the cookie-cutter designs that plague your nightmares?

I think more damage has been done by the proliferation of iconic images of "The Great Golf Holes". ANGC's 13th, with it's snowy white bunkers, perfect turf and ornamental trees, Sawgrass' Island Green, Oakmont's Church Pews,... These have become part of a visual language of "Great Golf" - and people (NATURALLY) utilize it.

More recently, the interest in the work of Doak and C&C will most likely begin to affect that language as well. No doubt we'll begin to see more ragged-edged bunkers (these are visually obvious, and therefore easy to pick-up)

 

[Tom_Doak]

It is not clear to me where you draw the line between one and the other.

There are certain aspects of artistic design -- composition, harmony (or not), balance (or not), which you cannot avoid when you are laying out a golf course.  If you can see the lines of the fairway and the positions of the bunkers, their shape and position is going to create a visual impact, whether you want it to or not.  It would seem silly to me to ignore that impact completely.

We also try hard to present different looks to the tee shots and different backgrounds and settings for the greens.  That may be practicing landscape architecture by Tom's definition, I don't know, but we are not necessarily altering Nature at all to achieve those results ... a lot of times we're just putting people in the right places through the layout of holes.

[BCrosby]

Tom -

You raise big questions. The interplay of la and gca is complicated.

Let me make some crude, ridiculous generalizations. I encourage people to fire away at them.

In reaction to the Victorian era, there was a movement to build natural looking inland courses. Colt was the leader of the movement. There was little attempt to idealize nature. Rather the natural terrain was to be messed with as little as possible. The existing landscape was to be left alone to the extent possible. On the model of links courses.

That notion carried through to the Golden Age. Don't rationalize nature (like the Victorians) or prettify nature (like the lanscape artists). Leave things alone as much as possible.

Then something changed. Sometime in the 60's or 70's, the idea came about that the beauty of a course was a goal in itself. Even at the expense of tradtional golf values. It proved to be a very popular idea. Thousands and thousands of trees were planted, irrigation pipes laid, flower beds carved out, shrubs cultivated, fancy stone walls built, the whole thing.

For 20 or 30 years there was something like an Aesthetic Age. Even great, great courses were prettified in any number of different ways. And if the prettification detracted from shot options, say, so much the worse for shot options.

In the last ten years or so there's been a reaction to all that. I see the best of the younger generation of archies moving back towards a more agnostic view of the landscape and beauty thing. They seem to want to leave nature alone to the extent possible. That's pretty enough for them. Doak, C&C, Young and others seem to operate on that premise. A very different one from RTJ or Fazio or the typical green chairman circa 1965.  

(Speaking of gca and la, it's worth noting that the book Cornish did for his course on gca at the HSD operates on the principle that gca is a sub-type of la. I guess his aim was to give gca academic credibility so he can teach a course at HSD. (It is not coincidental that the architect most frequently cited in the book is Tom Fazio.) I disagree about all that. As long as gca is measured primarily by the kind of golf it calls forth - and not prmarily the aesthetics of the course - it is not a sub-unit of la. And thus does not deserve a place in a college course catalogue.

But all of that is just my own little bugbear. I think the book Cornish did for his gca course is infuriating. It misrepresents gca in a pretty fundamental way. His take is skewed so much towards la that he leaves out the "golf" part of golf course architecture.)

Any of this make sense?

Bob
   

[Tom_Doak]

Bob:

THAT distinction I can understand, and I pretty much agree with your generalizations, although Colt should be counted as a golden-age guy, too.

Fazio pretty much talks about golf course design as all landscape architecture, he seldom talks about the golf part.  And Nicklaus talks about the golf part and the visibility thereof, and little else, even though he is sometimes blowing up mountains to make his golf shots how he wants them and therefore someone has to address the landscape architecture part.  It's easy to see why they are at odds on many levels.

You've got to be able to integrate the two.

[Gary Daughters]

TEP..

Perhaps I'm reading too much into it, but your post reads like a call to arms.  Revolution Now!  And death to all ties between gca and suburbanism's anti-values.

Can't wait for your followup.

Adam Foster Collins..

Your sentiments are quite interesting, more grounded perhaps that TEP's, but let's hope he's onto something.

Just one pedestrian question.  What does this mean?

" .. the average bunker is very much an abstract form which has little connection with reality anymore."

Do you mean "reality" as in a naturally occuring feature, or as in something connected to the game of golf?  A bunker seems pretty real to me, especially when I am in it.

[BCrosby]

Tom -

Golf values and aesthetic values are necessarily integrated. How you pull off that integration is what separates great architecture from not so great architecture, imho.

But however you do it, the golf ought to be  master to the aesthetic. I am convinced that there are some architects out there who have forgotton that the primary function of a golf course is to serve as a place to play golf. Not to contemplate bucolic vistas. Not to be a backyard for eight bedroom mansions. Not to frame beautiful sunsets.

One of the things that was "Golden" about the "Golden Age" was that for a couple of decades a remarkable balance was struck between the values of the game and the beauty of a venue. It seemed to be in the air they breathed.

Rediscovering that balance is a reason for the popularity of the work of your generation of architects, I would guess. Though some are better than others at striking that balance, everyone seems to understand the issue.

Agreed about Colt. I did not mean to imply he was not a Golden Ager in good standing.

Bob

[Adam_F_Collins]

Just one pedestrian question.  What does this mean?

" .. the average bunker is very much an abstract form which has little connection with reality anymore."

Sorry Gary, I guess I should have said "has little connection to NATURE anymore." The amoeba-like forms of many bunkers are far from natural in appearance, and are quite particular to golf courses.

[Ryan Farrow]

Crosby, what is the name of this Cornish book you speak of? Is it worth the time to read?


I have this new problem where I order books from Amazon.com and then I wait a month becuase i checked the free shipping box.

[TEPaul]

Gary:

No, I'm sure not advocating any call to arm, any revolution or death to suburban anti-values. I'm just posing a sort of philosophical question that pertains to the way golf course architecture has evolved in relation to or influenced by landscape architecture in various ways.

Adam:

I realize there is a 'language' to landscape architecture and perhaps golf course architecture too. Perhaps one should look back and analyze how that "language" came to be written or spoke in the last 100 years of some nexus between GCA and LA. By the way, the landscape architecture developed by the likes of Brown and Repton early on, the type you refer to as "pastoral" are most certainly not upsetting to me as it was applied to golf course architecture----of any form of landscape architecture that has influenced golf course architecture that particular type and style was probably the most beneficial or at least the least detrimental of all types and styles of LA, in my opinion. Nevertheless, even that beautiful pastoral style of LA was also a somewhat "idealized" representation of Nature.

BobC:

I like your posts about playability and the essence of the game itself perhaps giving way in some sense and to some degree to perhaps aesthetics or the aesthetics of landscape architecture. I'm sure you can sense all this is in some ways inspired by that dialectic and perhaps "great crossroads" we've been talking about recently. Behr may've been a proponent in some small way of landscape architecture but I think we both know his message (or warning) was a lot deeper than just that back then. However, if he'd had the benefit of seeing what the ensuing 80 years would bring (since he wrote) his message regarding the influence on GCA of LA may've been different, greater, more dire, whatever.  

[Troy Alderson]

Tom Paul,

Do we all think that TOC is the most natural golf course?  But let's remember that even TOC has been manipulated by man over hundreds of years.  Most of the bunkers occur naturally from the sheep and natural erosion of the sand hills, but they were refined with sod walls and edging.  These days, we cannot wait that long for the golf course to develop, instant gratification.

The earth was given to us to use for our benefit.  We cut down trees in the forest and plant seedlings for future use.  We plow fields to yield a crop, we fish and hunt to eat, we raise livestock so as not to hunt if need be.

As to your inquiry, a golf course can develop over years if we are willing to wait.  But golf developed in Scotland for a reason, perfect climate and vegetation for the playing field.  Even GCAs like Doak and C+C manipulate the landscape to a point.  We just need to realize that we CANNOT improve upon what nature has given us, we can only refine it to fit our needs and how to use it sustainably.

Troy

[Garland Bayley]

Wouldn't Sand Hills or Pacific Dunes be a more natural landscape than TOC. When I worked on a sheep ranch, I didn't see the sheep creating any bunkers. And the idea that pot bunkers were created by repeated divots in the same place seems a bit far fectched to me.

Perhaps TEPaul can help me understand what is the landscape architecture visible in the pictures in Ran's review of Sand Hills. To me it seems it is golf architecture utilizing the same skills that the landscape architect uses. Just like the art from computer graphics is created using many of the same skills I use in creating other software, but no one says I am engaging in graphical arts.

[MikeJones]

I think every golf course constructed these days is built, at least in part, to look good. Looking good is what sells memberships at the vast majority of courses. Over the years principles of landscape architecture have become more widely used to create shapes and land forms on golf courses that are pleasing to the eye. I think the same thing happens in music, you take noise and form it into notes and series' of notes which are pleasing to the ear. I guess you could call music, noise architecture!

I think you have to look at early links courses for places that were built primarily for play with little thought of what they actually looked like. Links courses are still beautiful but no more so that walking through the dunes on a spring morning would be beautiful.

I'm positive that even the modern links course classics such as Bandon, Pacific and Barnbougle are built with looks formed by LA principles in mind as well as strategy. There's nothing wrong with this and I think they look stunning but I don't consider them to look completely natural.

[Tom_Doak]

Garland:

You should go to Westward Ho! in England, where the animals graze the golf course.  There are tons of miniature bunkers-to-be created by all the animal movements, which will then be scoured out by the wind if the maintenance crew doesn't fix them first.  If it wasn't being maintained it would probably be one giant bunker by now, or a million small ones with bits of turf around them.

Mike:

The main false aspect of modern golf architecture is that everything is designed to look good from certain points (i.e. from the tee or fairway).  In nature each bunker would reveal itself from a different angle.  We've built a few features that way to make some of our courses look more natural, but still, you can tell.

[Gary Daughters]

Garland:

The sheep connection to bunkers was the big epiphany of my trip last year to Scotland.  To the side of one of the courses, off the property actually, was a series of naturally occuring bunkers etched into little hillocks.  Sheep were laying inside them to shelter themselves from the wind. My head went BOING!  The bunkers looked just like C&C.

[BCrosby]

The main false aspect of modern golf architecture is that everything is designed to look good from certain points (i.e. from the tee or fairway).  In nature each bunker would reveal itself from a different angle.  We've built a few features that way to make some of our courses look more natural, but still, you can tell.

Tom -

Interesting. I wish you would elaborate a bit.

Is the idea that a course that is really natural looking will NOT have features that look appealing only from one point of view - i.e. from a tee or a fairway?

Is the flip side that a course that really IS natural looking will have some features that won't have the most visual appeal from the places most players will see them - i.e. from a tee or a fairway?

If I am in the vicinity of what you are getting at, it's a wonderful distinction. It leads to the idea that golf holes should not be built like stage sets that create an illusion of nature from only a single perspective. Because viewed from any other perspective, they will look unappealing and unnatural.

Bob

[Garland Bayley]

Garland:

You should go to Westward Ho! in England, where the animals graze the golf course.  There are tons of miniature bunkers-to-be created by all the animal movements, which will then be scoured out by the wind if the maintenance crew doesn't fix them first.  If it wasn't being maintained it would probably be one giant bunker by now, or a million small ones with bits of turf around them.
...

OK, I think we are talking about over-grazing here, which doesn't have to happen in the vast wide open spaces of the western US. I can understand the effects of overpopulation creating bunkers, but then that is not natural. Until man came along and upset the balance, nature had pretty effective mechanisms for controlling overpopulation.

[Marty Bonnar]

TEP,
I am less and less convinced that Landscape Architecture is EVEN an artform anymore.

I begin to wonder if having to deal with the banalities and trivialities of day-to-day Practice hasn't removed all of the artistry once involved in the discipline.

I know that I spend less time designing than I do in meetings; that I have less time to consider beauty than I do to consider (FECKIN'!) Health and Safety; that drainage, construction methods and economy are apparently more important than harmony, balance, proportion or any of those other vital necessities.

Seems to me that the 'Art' is now only in 'Art'isanal and that the 'Archi'-'Tekton' should now be the 'Archi'-whatever Ancient Greek is for 'Administrator'!

FBD.

[Tom_Doak]

Bob:

Yes, you're getting the gist of what I was talking about.  At Ballyneal we have considered going out and digging 100 or 200 bunkers way out between the holes so it's not so obvious that all the blowouts are concentrated at the edges of the golf holes.  (Sand Hills, by the way, has that same dead giveaway ... there were a few natural blowouts but they put holes right beside them, and then dug more beside the rest of the holes.)

We all do worry far too much about what the golfer can see [visibility of target, visibility of other players, visibility of hazards which would otherwise be "unfair"], and on top of that we try to make courses look pretty in the arrangement and styling of hazards.  On old-fashioned links they just didn't worry about that stuff at all.

[Jeff_Brauer]

TePaul,

I avoided this topic, because I think your premise is wrong.

The classic definition of landscape architecture is the art of modifying the land to accomodate a use by man.  To my way of thinking, gca is and always will be a subset of the broader field of LA, under that definition and because the skill set is so similar.  

While the Cornish Harmony, Proportions, etc. etc. you often mention is a part of any design profession like building architecture, it is not the first and foremost premise of any design profession.  In fact, most professors and my mentors stressed getting the site circulation right before anything else.

Every golf course is a modification of the land to some extent to make it acceptable/better/right for its intended purpose.  The extent of those modification stem from the land itself - great to crappy - and the goals of the owner and designer - including low cost, high cost, minimalism, wow factor, etc.

The aesthetic side of design is built on top of the practical, and as is obvious, each practitioner has his/her own view of what aesthetic is, or at least differeing abilities to pull it off. In landscape architecture there have been practitioners who  are probably akin to minimalists and there are those who professed (Sasaki for one) that "The land is putty" much like Fazio does in golf.

Because there is such a broad set of variables, there could never be one movement - whether the LA movement or the non LA movement - that would end up changing the direction of golf course design signifigantly - at least over time, even though fads and trends (and technology) do seem to occur in every decade, as with everything else.  And one reason for that is that most designers and owners somewhere on their list have "stand out as different" as a design criteria.

It is clear to me, however, that the 50's generation of gca's did focus on modernization and landscape architecture, as that is how they were trained, and that is how they saw their challenges.  Part of that may be attributed to the influx of housing and public courses that were driving golf, part of it may have been the pre-Bethpage syndrome - no need to build a US Open course, cause its gonna stay at NE clubs like Wing Foot - and part of it may have been the less money available then.  For whatever reason, fewer clients asked for great courses, probably because they didn't pay.

Its also clear that the major landscape architecture trend from Britain, brought to the US, was an idealized version of the English landscape, rearranged to be more perfect and in "the right places".  I think that ideal was combined with a US trend towards modernization, while tech stuff like irrigation and production mowing really allowed us to get the idealized look of the counry estate in everything from home lawns to golf courses and parks in places where grass wouldn't normally grow, like the desert.

Lastly, it seems clear that the driving force isn't the gca - its really the homeowner beside the couse who has bought into the English landscape concept which forced the home builders building the golf courses to "clean them up" as much as anything. Perhaps its no coincidence that many great courses with scruffier looks have occurred on stand alone properties where such influences didn't matter as much to the desginer and owner.


I guess US gca would have to have at one time be classified as an idealized Scottish landscape.  As Tom Doak notes, random bunkering would be more convincing than the more spartan (and practical) use of bunkers just beyond the fw edges.  Once again, however, Tom and about 1500 gca enthusiasts may be the only ones who care about such deep seated topics related to gca.........they probably wonder "what the hell are all those bunkers doing way out there!"

[Scott Witter]

Jeff, Tom D. and others..these addditional bunkers you speak of, sure there are a few of us who do notice this and who do think about it and so was this something that Pete Dye was going after when he created Whistling Straits?  Though I have never been there, I do remember watching the PGA on TV and also seeing/reading many articles in the rags about it and it certainly had the appearance of what you speak....many many loosely placed bunkers, clusters, randomly positioned and clearly WAY out of play.  They did give the feeling of a broader landscape character with the golf course placed within it, that if you didn't know better, and my father-in-law didn't, so he asked me how the landscape got that way, but was very surprised whan I told him that it was all manufactured!

[Andrew Balakshin]

To tell you the truth Paul, I have been thinking about this all day too.
 
After reading what you and Forest said yesterday on my thread I wrote a long reply last night but I didn't post it because I wasn't even sure I understood what I was saying.
 
Part of what I was thinking about was what Forrest said ("does it play the way it looks, or look the way it plays") and I guess you could say that GCA is part aesthetics (look) and part playability (play).
 
I think this matters a lot because it determines golfers' interpretation of an architect’s style. You could say Nicklaus' style is leaning more to the playability side. Since his courses are all over the world and in so many different environments he has little aesthetic style (specific to himself). Golfers’ interpretations of his style are more based on the type of shots they take during a round (and the immaculate conditioning but that doesn’t count ).

I have seen pictures of a Bob Cupp course called Palmetto Hall in South Carolina and the bunkers and mounds are all shaped geometrically. I think most of the people here would be quick to say that is gimmicky and a cheap trick to sell more rounds in a golf saturated area (myself included). This is where GCA is different from art because when Picasso did the same type of thing he was considered a genius. It seems as though these “rules” that govern GCA (yardage, green size, etc, etc) prevent anything new from developing. Is it possible for a “Picasso” of GCA in the future? I’m not saying I would be in favour of a “revolution” as Gary puts it, but I wouldn’t be against it either. Would the movement of golf courses inland been called a revolution?

If you follow these “rules” of golf course design to closely it seems it is hard to have a specific design style. If I was an architect (yeah I’m dreaming big time here) I would want to know whether to develop my own style or to try and make great golf courses most like the top 100 courses (is it possible to have a unique style and be top 100?).
 
I was sitting on a roller all day rolling out a fairway so I really had nothing to do but think about this (sitting on a golf course thinking about golf all day, yeah I know I have a one track life).
 
Reading this new thread however has been a lot and I’m going to print it out and try to understand what you guys are saying. I now realize how little I know about LA but I hope I can add something else tomorrow!



Ryan: That Cornish book is really good if it’s the one I’m thinking of (written with the late Robert Muir Graves), it sort or reminds me of a textbook though.

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