This remark just may be the ultimate TRUTH.....

[Norbert P]

"The secret of life is 'Honesty'. . .


... ...  ... ...


 If you can fake that, you've got it made."    George Burns

[TEPaul]

"So to get back to my (and Tom's) original quaere, why is that the case? Why do people seem to prefer a course that appears more natural over others that don't."


Bob:

While that may be the case, and I guess both you and I have generally felt that it is or at least should be the case, I am more than willing to consider, perhaps far more than we ever realized, that a very good number of people and golfers and perhaps golf architects may believe, even if somewhat subconsciously or subliminally, that that should not necessarily be the case.

Please don't forget one half of that age old dynamic I mentioned that I feel was touched upon by Max Behr----eg "Man's inherent relationship with Nature", is a most complex dynamic indeed and in and of itself (forgetting for a moment about Behr's implied COMPARISION of that dynamic to the dynamic of "Man's relationship to Man himself").

Of course, a great many of us appreciate the beauty of Nature and appreciate the beauty of the LOOK of pure Nature unsullied by Man in any way at all, but let's not forget Man has probably always been in many ways intimidated by raw Nature and her remarkable "forces" and for that reason has striven mightly throughout his existence to control it in many ways and even dominate it in massive ways.

I believe some, even if subliminally, may actually glory in Man's increasing ability to do just that and may even glorify that which is man-made and even looks man-made, including with golf course architecture, for that very reason!

[Mike_Cirba]

This whole idea of artificial features "merging" into their natural surrounds also found it's way into Alan Wilson's 1926 report on the origins of the golf courses at Merion.   The way he describes their work sounds as though it was clearly purposefully done.


"We should also be grateful to this committee because they did not as is so often the case deface the landscape. They wisely utilized the natural hazards wherever possible, markedly on the third hole, which Mr. Alison  thought the best green he had seen in America, the fourth, fifth, the seventh, the ninth, the eleventh, the sixteenth, the seventeenth, and the eighteenth. We know the bunkering is all artificial but most of it fits into the surrounding landscape so well and has so natural a look that it seems as if many of the bunkers might have been formed by erosion, either wind or water and this of course is the artistic result which should be gotten."

[JMorgan]

Rich and JMorgan:

As usual you are just totally missing the point of this thread and this entire dynamic. The trap you fall into is with your insistence that if there is even a single iota of the man-made then this dynamic and this subject and this discussion should basically not exist or even be considered.

Tom, that's not what I'm saying at all.  Here is the Mackenzie remark:

"As I stated to you verbally, the work is so good that you may not get the credit you deserve. Few if any golfers will realize that Melrose has been constructed by the hand of man and not by nature."

You are calling this statement "the ultimate TRUTH of the fundamental dynamic in all golf course architecture."

Correct me if I am wrong, but Mack is in essence saying to Maxwell, You know, Perry, you mimicked nature so perfectly that others may not even recognize the work it took to create that great golf course of yours. 

Maxwell's intention was to create a course in which it appeared as if the hand of man had no part.

Other architects, however -- say Seth Raynor, Pete Dye, fill in the blank -- did or do not start out with that intention at all.  By saying that Mackenzie's remark represents the fundamental dynamic of golf course architecture, you are excluding a whole host of architects and their intentions. 

[archie_struthers]

 

Sounds like  MacKenzie had a brush with the great minimalist in the sky , or Obi Wan as a prelude to his writiing.

Hence ...I opine that most of us , particularly older connoisseurs ( heh heh..)  tend to admire the minimalists to such a great degree that methinks we may protest too much

.youthful golfers/ architects would IMHO tend to opt for much bolder striking design ...reflecting the speed their life moves at  ...and has since birth

they are used to much more eye candy ...wow factor  ...than most of us


note that  Desmond Muirhead ,  Gary Player , even MIke Strantz  would typically be less well received than  Coore / Crenshaw or Doak among most afficionados on this site , who tend to have a long history and affiliation with the game, and have a more cultured palate. Or at least think they do LOL!

I was literally amazed when I took a walk with the youngish designer of the Shoregate (another Jersey course 15 miles south) around Twisted Dune...who asked me why my lines of charm were so rounded,  muted ,  basicly boring ... given I had a blank canvas to work with....

previously my biggest concern was that I had not concealed the manufactured edges ...and here he was asking why I did it ...our ideas of good stuff were almost antithical  ...though we were both building similar courses.... abstract expressionist meets wanna be minimalist

I submit age ...experience...time  ...tha amorphous  " eye of the beholder"   tend to bring  impressions of golf architecture into a diferent focus... MacKenzie was long there when he opined that the ultimate compliment ...that achieving a oneness with nature might  go unnoticed save by the cognoscenti !  I'm with him...until I find the fountain on my next trip to  Florida...


Quite good topic TEP   ....may the force be with you!









                              

[TEPaul]

"Other architects, however -- say Seth Raynor, Pete Dye, fill in the blank -- did or do not start out with that intention at all.  By saying that Mackenzie's remark represents the fundamental dynamic of golf course architecture, you are excluding a whole host of architects and their intentions."

JMorgan:

I am not excluding a whole host of architects and their intentions (or even a whole host of golfers and their preferences) at all. Matter of fact, I am very much trying to do the very opposite----eg INCLUDE all architects and all golfers and their particular preferences and motivations regarding golf course architecture.

Perhaps in my initial post you thought I meant to say that Mackenzie's remark represented some fundamental TRUTH in golf architectural "PRINCIPLES". I didn't say that though; I said his remark probably represented the ultimate TRUTH of an essential "DYNAMIC" in golf course architecture!  (Of course one would probably need to assume that Mackenzie did not mean to say and/or Maxwell did not aspire to purposefully avoid any credit at all for doing what he did with golf course architecture! One could probably logically assume that both Mackenzie and Maxwell might hope that most golfers could actually see that they did a lot to make it look like they did almost nothing, but I think we can all see there's a pretty interesting dynamic in even that! ).

There is a very great difference between the one and the other.

Ultimately, I'm trying to ask this question:

"Is it possible that even if most all architects and even golfers say they like things to look "Natural" in golf course architecture that they actually prefer a look of the man-made in architect as long as it isn't completely obnoxious?"


I believe I can even find a good number of intelligent golfers who will actually say they prefer man-made looking architecture and that they can also very much understand and see the differences between wholly natural architectural elements and natural looking (man-made) architecture compared to artificial looking architecture that is clearly man-made!

My sense is that far more than we realize might prefer the latter even if subliminally.

[BCrosby]

JMorgan -

Well, yes. TEP is being bit hyperbolic. There are worse sins. But the grain of truth is that, yes again, what Tom said certainly suggests that he holds some architects in higher esteem than others.

BTW, I agree with your take on what MacK meant.

TEP -

I take the importance of nature in gca slightly differently. Less metaphysically perhaps.

I do not think that people are drawn to "natural" courses for aesthetic reasons alone. (Those are Farnie quotation marks, signifying that I don't mean "natural" literally) It's about more than a course just being attractive.  

I think people are drawn to more natural "appearing" (again, Farnie marks) courses because such courses break down - in a healthy way - our rational expectations about shot outcomes. Good shots may or may not turn out as we think we deserve. Such courses break down our elaborate systems of just rewards precisely because we feel like we are playing in a natural setting. And wwe all know that nature couldn't care less about just rewards.

You are less likely to beef about "fairness" on those sorts of courses. Which suggests that they put you in a different mindset. Just like you wouldn't beef about fairness if you didn't catch any fish at the pond, even though all of your casts were picture perfect.

In short, such golf courses function as little psychological universes that are very different from the ones we normally inhabit. Moreover, it's a universe that few other human activities give us access to.

I'm not sure that makes sense. I'm trying to flesh out something I felt for a while but failed to articulate very well.

Bob  

[TEPaul]

"Sounds like  MacKenzie had a brush with the great minimalist in the sky , or Obi Wan as a prelude to his writiing."

ARCHIE. ARCHIE STRUTHERS!!!!

I think what Mackenzie had a real brush with was not just the great minimalist in the sky or Obi Wan Kanobe as a prelude to his thinking and writing about the true "Look" of naturalism in golf architecture but that he had a real brush with some very real life and death circumstances when it came to constructing military bunkers that looked really artificial on the one side (the British) and really natural on the other (the Boers).

That got his attention bigtime and that he actually thought to apply this idea from that particular application   to golf course architecture from military trench warfare (that we refer to as his "camouflage" ideas) just might be one of the most brilliant and out-of-the-box transformations or transportations of a "concept" imaginable.

The fact is he certainly did realize if those Boers did not make their trenches (even though they certainly weren't naturally occurring) look like they were wholly naturally occurring then they realized they were going to die a whole lot more easily than they did.

Did you know that the Boers did not just make their own manned trenches look wholly naturally occurring but they also made unmanned trenches to look just like the British highly artificial looking manned trenches?

[TEPaul]

"JMorgan -
Well, yes. TEP is being bit hyperbolic. There are worse sins. But the grain of truth is that, yes again, what Tom said certainly suggests that he holds some architects in higher esteem than others."


Bob:

I'm actually trying not to be hyberbolic at all. I think there really is something there beneath the surface of all this and I think it is massively fundamental. I think it is a huge DYNAMIC which only means to me that many people look at it and feel about it quite differently and in a fundamental sense---eg some or many really do prefer what is natural or looks natural in GCA and some or many may not and may even prefer the obviously artificial and man-made in GCA, even if they may not consciously understand why. I'm not saying that what they recognize as the clearly man-made and artificial is something that is obnoxious looking to them, but nevertheless they can see it as artificial and probably in a real way an artistic artificiality that is appealing somehow. (I think in the middle paragraphs of his thread above R.J. Daley articulated the reasons this may be the case).

I do prefer some architects over others but maybe not in the same way you might think. I do love real naturalism and the look of it in architecture but I am also totally fascinated in particular juxtapositions of artificiality in an otherwise natural setting, particularly if golf's shot values are well expressed and represented in the arrangement.

I tend to like architects who in sometimes ineffable ways can evoke some kind of pretty sensate reactions from golfers that somehow inspire them even if they may not be completely sure why. I tend not to admire architects who can't or don't do that and also don't do much for various shot values in their arrangements either.

[Bradley Anderson]

What exactly is it about a golf hole that makes it appear natural?

I know it when I see it, but I can't explain it.

Sometimes I have seen it in a Raynor green and no one believes me when I say it looks natural, beacause it is so obviously square and rectilinear, to which I have always answered that nature, at least were I am from, is very often square and rectilinear; nature very often displays simple lines that are easy for the eye to connect.

Then there are places where nature is flamboyant, wild and wind blown. MacKenzie could build features that fit in those environments.

[TEPaul]

"What exactly is it about a golf hole that makes it appear natural?
I know it when I see it, but I can't explain it."


Bradley:

I think I've gotten pretty good at figuring out how to see it and here's how I try to explain what I see.

Let's just take greens as an example because that was clearly the part where most of the truly significant man-made architecture was done in the old days other than the individual bunkering on the rest of the hole and tees.

With most of the old architecture which obviously used the old pushup green method, I just go out around a green, for instance, around the entire thing and just go out far enough in any and every direction to pick up what almost definitely appears to be untouched natural pre-construction grade and slope and such and then just come in (and from all sides) always trying to notice and imagine what it once looked like out there before construction.

Doing it that way it's just amazing what all you can pick up about how something like a green was made, how and why and not just that but also where they got the material to do it. Over time I've compared it to pre-construction topos that I never even knew existed previously and its pretty amazing how logical and intuitive the whole process was back then and how easy it is to see today without a preconstruction topo or really knowing what it once looked like from a preconstruction photo or whatever.

Today that is much harder to do because in modern times they were and are so much more capable and able to transport enormous quantities of dirt around a site.

Have you ever seen those enormous earthmoving machines that can look sort of like low profile dinasours? Well, they didn't have things like that back in the old days and so the whole process of what they did do back then is just so much more localized and conseqently more obvious in trying to match cuts and fills and stuff.

But the key to me is really analyzing what was never touched on the peripheries and what it all looked like before any construction as you begin to move in towards greens and from all sides and angles.   

[Peter Pallotta]

"...Such golf courses function as little psychological universes that are very different from the ones we normally inhabit. Moreover, it's a universe that few other human activities give us access to."

That's a fine observation and summary, Bob - and in  keeping with what appears to be the consensus here, I guess that means there are different psychological universes for different folks. But why I'd want to 'meet' an architect in the golfing universe when I can better meet (and have a drink with) him in the everyday universe, I wouldn't know

Peter

[RJ_Daley]

Bradley says:

What exactly is it about a golf hole that makes it appear natural?

I know it when I see it, but I can't explain it.

Sometimes I have seen it in a Raynor green and no one believes me when I say it looks natural, beacause it is so obviously square and rectilinear, to which I have always answered that nature, at least were I am from, is very often square and rectilinear; nature very often displays simple lines that are easy for the eye to connect.

I like this because it gets into our deep down instincts, and allows us to define what 'seems' plausibly emmulating nature from our own personal experiences and native frames of reference. 

Anotherwords, if you grew up near the ocean or great lakes where there are duneslands and wavy beach grasses to experience as part of your native environment, you develop an affinity for the lines and forms that are found within those environs, and that is what becomes your home base for an aesthetic sense of what is natural.  If you come from a barren and jagged place like Utah, you may have a natural affinity for those angular hard edged lines of broken and upheaval sedimentary plates.  So, your aesthetic sensibilities aren't insulted by a more sharp and defined line when someone builds a landform on a golf course that is hard edged.  Maybe urban or big city people have that affinity for squares and rectangles from looking at buildings all day, even buildings as back drops to manufactured park lands like Central Park, where there are nice natural areas in the park where you are standing, yet they incorporate the square buildings in the long view. 

This all takes me to what I felt was the deeply psychological analysis that John Strawn had in a last chapter of his book, "Driving the Green" where he tried to define why we as gamesman-sportsman playing a ball and impliment acquisition of a target goal-is-a-hole, may have a deeply innate allure to the grassy turfy fields of play.  We in our deep genetic recesses have an affinity to that place where ancients hunted and gathered, not unlike the game we now recreate with in ball and impliment targeting, and we just know it when we see it, and it is a reminiscent land form, be it man made to not insult that innate sense of home place while giving us a place to play our game, or very focused effort to fool us that it is totally a natural field of play blended imperceptably into the surrounding natural setting. 

Maybe one man's insult to nature on a golf course manufactured landform is anotherman's native homeplace aesthetic...  Like some of us are descended from the mountain primatives, and some from the plains primatives, and some from the swamps... and so we know it when we see it due to evolved genetic coding as part of our tribes survival and affinity to homeplace.

Oh boy, I'm up too late... 

[Rich Goodale]

I take the importance of nature in gca slightly differently. Less metaphysically perhaps.

I do not think that people are drawn to "natural" courses for aesthetic reasons alone. (Those are Farnie quotation marks, signifying that I don't mean "natural" literally) It's about more than a course just being attractive.  

I think people are drawn to more natural "appearing" (again, Farnie marks) courses because such courses break down - in a healthy way - our rational expectations about shot outcomes. Good shots may or may not turn out as we think we deserve. Such courses break down our elaborate systems of just rewards precisely because we feel like we are playing in a natural setting. And wwe all know that nature couldn't care less about just rewards.

You are less likely to beef about "fairness" on those sorts of courses. Which suggests that they put you in a different mindset. Just like you wouldn't beef about fairness if you didn't catch any fish at the pond, even though all of your casts were picture perfect.

In short, such golf courses function as little psychological universes that are very different from the ones we normally inhabit. Moreover, it's a universe that few other human activities give us access to.

I'm not sure that makes sense. I'm trying to flesh out something I felt for a while but failed to articulate very well.

Bob  

Interesting thoughts, Bob.

I agree on the "little psychological universes" idea, but I'm not sure it is generically unique.  I've experienced similar feelings to what I think you are articulating about "natural" (marks non-used hereafter in homage to the BobCat) golf courses in other game/sport type endeavors, ranging from tennis to aseball to basketball to rugby to sailing and crosswords.  It relates to the rare but sublime feeling of being in the "zone."

I will quibble on the seeming presumption that the reward "values" for "good" shots are significantly lower on natural courses than they are on un-natural ones.  Maybe this is the case the time you first play a place like The Old Course, but the more you know what is over those pesky hills and on those distant greens, the more you should know wher to place your shots, and if you know that, a good shot will be rewarded just as much (maybe relatively more) than a good one on a more standard course.

To me the fun starts on natural courses when you hit a not-so good shot, and must re-strategize your play of the hole once you have found the wayward pelota.  On the greatest courses, these recovery shots give a turbo-boost to the Funmeter, and when the wind is blowing it is impossible not to keep a glaikit SEQ on your face, unless you are tempermentally-challenged.

Given that even the greatest golfers hit not-so good shots, and mortals such as we probably hit more of them than good shots in just about every round we play it is not surprising that the natural courses tend to "rank" higher than non-natural ones.

Hope this helps

Farnie

[Bradley Anderson]

"What exactly is it about a golf hole that makes it appear natural?
I know it when I see it, but I can't explain it."

With most of the old architecture which obviously used the old pushup green method, I just go out around a green, for instance, around the entire thing and just go out far enough in any and every direction to pick up what almost definitely appears to be untouched natural pre-construction grade and slope and such and then just come in (and from all sides) always trying to notice and imagine what it once looked like out there before construction.

Doing it that way it's just amazing what all you can pick up about how something like a green was made, how and why and not just that but also where they got the material to do it. Over time I've compared it to pre-construction topos that I never even knew existed previously and its pretty amazing how logical and intuitive the whole process was back then and how easy it is to see today without a preconstruction topo or really knowing what it once looked like from a preconstruction photo or whatever.

Today that is much harder to do because in modern times they were and are so much more capable and able to transport enormous quantities of dirt around a site.

That's very interesting Tom, because in nature, where ever the earth has been fromed into a certain shape by wind or erosion, there is what I would call a proprtionate cut and fill balance right there.

So the early architects made things that looked more natural, in part because their balance of cut and fill was proportionate in contained areas, just as you would encounter in nature. When we get to the age of iron we loose that proportionate balance of cut and fill because we have the ability to move large volumns of earth great distances.

[Bradley Anderson]

Darn these keys - here's what I meant to type:

That's very interesting Tom, because in nature, where ever the earth has been formed into a certain shape by wind or erosion, there is what I would call a proportionate cut and fill balance right there.

So the early architects made things that looked more natural, in part because their balance of cut and fill was proportionate in contained areas, just as you would encounter in nature. When we get to the age of iron we loose that proportionate balance of cut and fill because we have the ability to move large volumns of earth great distances.

In the dunes land we see that a mounded area is created by wind blown sand, and that the sand came from a cavity that is just below the grade of the mound. So we could say that nature builds things up with material that is close at hand, and that is kind of the way they built things in the golden age, and that is why golden age architecture tends to look more at home in its environment.
 

[Sean_A]

I take the importance of nature in gca slightly differently. Less metaphysically perhaps.

I do not think that people are drawn to "natural" courses for aesthetic reasons alone. (Those are Farnie quotation marks, signifying that I don't mean "natural" literally) It's about more than a course just being attractive.  

I think people are drawn to more natural "appearing" (again, Farnie marks) courses because such courses break down - in a healthy way - our rational expectations about shot outcomes. Good shots may or may not turn out as we think we deserve. Such courses break down our elaborate systems of just rewards precisely because we feel like we are playing in a natural setting. And wwe all know that nature couldn't care less about just rewards.

You are less likely to beef about "fairness" on those sorts of courses. Which suggests that they put you in a different mindset. Just like you wouldn't beef about fairness if you didn't catch any fish at the pond, even though all of your casts were picture perfect.

In short, such golf courses function as little psychological universes that are very different from the ones we normally inhabit. Moreover, it's a universe that few other human activities give us access to.

I'm not sure that makes sense. I'm trying to flesh out something I felt for a while but failed to articulate very well.

Bob  

I will quibble on the seeming presumption that the reward "values" for "good" shots are significantly lower on natural courses than they are on un-natural ones.  Maybe this is the case the time you first play a place like The Old Course, but the more you know what is over those pesky hills and on those distant greens, the more you should know wher to place your shots, and if you know that, a good shot will be rewarded just as much (maybe relatively more) than a good one on a more standard course.

Rich my man, you have found your groove.  I don't know how many times I have tried to explain that successfully negotiating the humps n bumps of a course is much less about luck than it is about knowledge and experience.  Hence the reason I hate the expression "bad luck" when a shot performs exactly the way nature prescribes.  I couldn't agree with you more - including the bit about relative reward on the more funky course. 

Ciao

[archie_struthers]

 

Going to repostulate that most people don't even know why they prefer one golf course to another,  they just like what they are told is good or where they score well...serious golfers..particularly those with architectural bents are in the small minority ..   .

Most artists assume the common people don't get it...and often they are right...could it be that simple?  MacKenzie was speaking to another apostle , yet saw the  need to reinforce his faith.

most people aren't  walking around greens like TEP  .... trying to figure out the genesis... they are not even walking LOL

[Kirk Gill]

Is Mackenzie saying that good, but understated architecture isn't going to deliver the accolades like good, yet overstated architecture?

Seems to me that the occasional extravagance has its place in golf architecture as well as the understated. I think of Pine Valley. There's much about the course that appears natural to my eye (from pictures). Yet there's something that seems.......hyperbolic? I don't want to offend anyone here, I'm just saying that the natural was a concern, but so was the heroic, and that perhaps nature was exaggerated for that purpose. And yet the course is as far as can be from seeming purely artificial. I'm reminded of the comment Frank Lloyd Wright made about Taliesin.....

"Of the hill, not on the hill..."


In other words, not to mimic nature, but to create a congruence with it. A juxtaposition, but a harmonious one.

[TEPaul]

Kirk:

I'll tell you one thing about Pine Valley---eg if all the trees were temporarily removed from the entire site one would REEEALLY notice the man created architecture one helluva whole lot more than now. I don't mean to suggest that would be a bad thing, perhaps an interesting and good thing but MY GOD would it be true!!


"Of the hill, not on the hill..."


I love that remark, Kirk!! Perhaps Colt should have gotten his way on #2 but somehow I'm glad Crump overrode him and got his way. What a green site and green surface but it is definitely on the hill as Crump wanted and not of the hill as Colt apparently suggested.