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[Charlie Goerges]

(you'll have to scroll down to see the mystery course)

In anticipation of the forthcoming results of the Armchair Architecture Contest I wanted to get the thread started by thanking our judges. After that I’ll add a brief intro and tour for the actual course built on the site that we used. I’m doing it because I don’t think that at this late stage it will affect the judges’ rankings much.







Anyhow, on to the judges. Luckily I was able to track down some photos of them in order to let you know who you’re dealing with as well as such biographical data as I’ve been able to glean from their posts/websites.










Yannick Pilon “The Rebel”



Yannick has been working for Graham Cooke & Assoc. Inc., out of Montreal, Quebec, since 1997 working on dozens of courses, from preliminary routings to final feature shapes out in the field.





“Papa” Paul Cowley



Paul works with Davis Love III as well as being a general rabble-rouser on GCA.com





Dave “Shivas” Schmidt



In addition to his ground-breaking work on the history and restoration of the Reverse Jans National golf course and its associated club The Honourable Company of Reverse Jans National Golfers, he has led the armed resistance to the use of the “Cheater Line”.





The Emperor Thomas Naccarato



Though not currently an active member of GCA, the emperor’s influence is still apparent to all.





“Agent” Jeff Brauer



Jeff has designed many acclaimed courses including 3 in my home state of Minnesota (I’ve not played any yet , but I plan to change that soon) including the Quarry and Legend courses at Giants Ridge and the Wilderness at Fortune Bay.





Mike “it’s not Rocket Science” Nuzzo



Mike has worked with Finger, Dye, Spann and more recently has completed his first solo design at Wolf Point Club.





Rich Goodale “The King”



Rich has published numerous books including “Experience Royal Dornoch” and the forthcoming “Experience the Reverse Jans National”.





We also started out with 2 additional judges. They may not be submitting rankings but I’d like to thank them for their support and feedback which helped me get this thing going.

“Sir” Ian Andrew






Ron “The Condor” Farris






And because I never tire of trotting out this picture, my dad and me hoisting “The Industrial Cup”







So watch this space for the next day or two for the unveiling of the “real” course, with contest results to follow.

And once again my deepest thanks to the judges!

[Tom Dunne]

Thanks for running the show, Charlie. Now the fun begins! My only suggestion would be to show the submissions in a series, but hold off on revealing the final scores/winner until the end. JMO.

PS: Homemade trophies rule.

[Charlie Goerges]

Sounds like a good plan Tom. That way I can get started sooner and not have to try to post everything all at once. I'll still get started with the actual course tonight I hope.

Charlie

P.S. My dad and I drank much of the "Champagne of Beers"(i.e. Miller High Life) out of that trophy.

[PPallotta]

You judges are doing Charlie, and all of us, a great favour - and you well deserve our thanks.  But a few of you probably owe Charlie a big thank-you -- I'm guessing the photos he posted are the best and coolest pictures of yourselves imaginable...

Peter

[Scott Witter]

Peter, you are very right.

It was recently said on another thread...I don't remember which, but after reading this one, I have to agree and proclaim that Charlie is clearly a breath of fresh energy and a great asset to this site.  Your talents can probably be claimed by many, but few have the energy to execute as well as you Charlie--thanks for all the sparkle.  Not sure where you have been hiding all this time, but we are glad you finally crawled out from under that desk and if I may say so, keep up the good work

Looking forward to seeing the results of this effort.

[Charlie Goerges]

Thanks for the kind words Peter and Scott. (Honestly though Peter, it's tough to find a bad picture of "Papa" Paul  )


Okay now is the moment of truth. The course I chose and depicted in the image below is…









OOOOOOOHHHH, can you feeeeeel the tension!







Erin Hills!

The reason I chose it was because it was generally regarded as a good, natural site that wouldn’t need a ton of earthmoving, but provided a rollicking landscape on which the contestants could let their imaginations go. I also chose it because if I chose a venerated old course I’d be taking my life in my hands.


A couple of shots from the electronic course (the drives depicted represent about a 250 yard shot):

Hole 4


Here the back tee is in the lower right corner, the shot is from a middle tee.





Hole 14


Here the shot is from the back tee.





A couple of caveats. I know that the Topo was relatively accurate, but smaller things like the shelf for the green on the 15th hole didn’t really show up, so the contestants couldn’t necessarily “find” those kinds of spots. Also, I’ve not played the course, and I had a hard time verifying that things worked out quite right as far as my reproduction of the course goes. Lastly, I didn’t draw a separate fairway line so all of my “fairways” actually encompass the fairways and maintained rough areas.

So there you have it. Here is a link to download the file if you wish.

http://cid-f73fd6728c175582.skydrive.live.com/self.aspx/Armchair%20Architecture%20Contest/Erin%20Hills.zip

You’ll have to unzip it (as well as install google sketckup) to view it. Questions/Comments are welcome.


Alright Contestants, I’m going to follow the protocol that Tom Dunne suggested above. So anyone who has completed their “show and tell” images/text, let me know when you’d like to post via PM. If you need some help I’d be happy to do so. I think we’ll start tomorrow.

[Mike Nuzzo]

Thanks Charlie
I'm glad you didn't submit this one as it wouldn't have won in my book.

Nice work and great choice.



My friends call me Mr. Einstein.

[Neil_Crafter]

Einstein......

Elvis Einstein.

Shaken not stirred.

[Garland Bayley]

Thanks Charlie
I'm glad you didn't submit this one as it wouldn't have won in my book.

Nice work and great choice.



My friends call me Mr. Einstein.

Wow! Did you guys read that! Let's bulldoze the course there and build a real US Open worthy course from the winning entry.
 

[Garland Bayley]

I am not familiar with Erin Hills, but I am sure surprised to see so much back and forth holes on this property! Have to wonder if they were channelling Dugger when they built it!

Sorry Michael I couldn't resist. Your compensation should you choose to accept it is a free round of golf at my place.

[Tom Dunne]

Erin Hills. Wow.

[Brendan Dolan]

I actually figured out when I opened the first armchair architecture thread that it was Erin Hills, as I worked on the construction crew that built it, and have a bunch of topos.   It should be interesting to see what people came up with without actually seeing the site or knowing what course it was.  The site has some really beautiful specimen trees, and Holy Hill to the East that could certainly be used as off site eye candy to help add to potential holes. I also noticed that they didn't have the mighty Ashipin(sp?) River , which is on the North side of the property in the topo that Charlie found which may have been an element that some one may have wanted to use.  I am looking forward to seeing some entries.

As a side note, for fun I spent hours looking at the topos trying to come up with my own routing but never could come up with something I liked.  I think that knowing the routing made it impossible for me.  I already had green and tee sites and playing corridors that I really liked from the chosen routing.   

Brendan
 

[Jim Colton]

Charlie,

  I think you made the 2nd green twice it's actual size!  Erin Hills was a great choice for the contest and I'm interested is seeing the other entrants.  In one of my original routings, I had a hole just like the real 15th but there was no way I get out to that back corner and return the nine without it simply going straight out and back.  Of course, EH solved this problem by thinking outside the box and adding an extra hole.  I wonder, if like Mike suggested, an extra hole would've disqualified the actual entry or at best mean big negative points in the routing category.  Personally, I don't view routing as EH's strong suit and I'm sure many entries would likely beat the real thing in this category at least on paper.

  I pasted your EH routing on top of mine and I have greens in the exact same spot as the 2nd, 6th and 7th, which I thought was pretty cool.

  Thanks again for organizing Charlie.  It was a cool experience and I definitely have even more respect for those who do the real thing.

[Charlie Goerges]

Well, at least Erin Hills seems to have been a good choice based on the topopgraphy.

Brendan, the phenomenon that you ran into is the reason I didn't want to tell anyone what it was. I thought that knowing would only complicate matters. Jeff Brauer had figured it out right away as well.

Jim, I did a file with everyone's routings overlaid and found that a few spots got used multiple times. Surprisingly the entire 4th hole was used by at least 2 of the contestants.

Garland, whenever you're ready, feel free to post your show and tell. I'll post everyone's routing anonymously and then you can start. After that everyone can follow as they finish. Once the results are in and everyone's show and tells are posted, you'll get the judges judgements.

[Charlie Goerges]

Here are the aerials of the contestants with Erin Hills first. The order is just the randomized order I created to send to the judges. The last two are Tom Dunne’s routing (unfortunately too late for the contest), one without hole numbers and one with hole numbers.

Erin Hills:





001:

Hole by Hole Tour: http://golfclubatlas.com/forum/index.php/topic,38988.0.html





002:

Hole by Hole Tour: http://golfclubatlas.com/forum/index.php/topic,38996.0.html





003:

Hole by Hole Tour: http://golfclubatlas.com/forum/index.php/topic,39001.0.html





004:

Hole by Hole Tour: http://golfclubatlas.com/forum/index.php/topic,38984.0.html





005:

Hole by Hole Tour: http://golfclubatlas.com/forum/index.php/topic,38987.0.html





006:

Hole by Hole Tour: http://golfclubatlas.com/forum/index.php/topic,39036.0.html





007:

Hole by Hole Tour: http://golfclubatlas.com/forum/index.php/topic,39140.0.html





008:

Hole by Hole Tour Part 1: http://golfclubatlas.com/forum/index.php/topic,39023.0.html
Hole by Hole Tour Part 2: http://golfclubatlas.com/forum/index.php/topic,39024.0.html





Tom Dunne:

[Yannick Pilon]

Wow!

I had no clue it was Erin Hills as I was judging this thing!!  But it became evident as soon as I saw the routing!
 
I appologize for the guy who had hole no. 10 as the first hole of his routing!  I trashed the hole right out of the gate!!!    Just by looking at the contours, I was sure that this hole would never work!  I guess I would need to see the real hole, thought, before I make a final judgement call!

This is going to be fun....

YP

[Charlie Goerges]

Tom, it seems I've managed to shrink the images of your routing too much. I'll re-output them and post when I get a chance.

Also, anyone else who'd like to get started posting their "show and tells" go ahead and get started. To get the images out of sketchup, just go to File>Export>2D Graphic and save the image. For those of you who have communicated with me to post your show and tell, just proceed as discussed.

Charlie

[Matthew Rose]

I was going to enter, but I went over my monthly bandwidth and got bumped back to dialup speed... as a result I had trouble downloading everything. I wish I'd gone through with it now.

I still have my paper routing that I did somewhere.

[Garland Bayley]

I am truly amazed at the drawing skills of some of these guys using that tool. Was #006 really done with Sketchup? WOW!

[Brendan Dolan]

Deleted

[Charlie Goerges]

expired.

[Michael Dugger]

I am not familiar with Erin Hills, but I am sure surprised to see so much back and forth holes on this property! Have to wonder if they were channelling Dugger when they built it!

Sorry Michael I couldn't resist. Your compensation should you choose to accept it is a free round of golf at my place.

It's okay Garland.  Yer lucky I couldn't get my sketchup to work worth a damn or I'd be bringing this trophy home.

[Charlie Goerges]

I'm glad you guys (the contestants) are able to come out of your shells enough to be able to post your hole by holes .

In the immortal words of Garland Bayley, "I've spent a lot of time on this, if you guys think you're going to get away without sitting through a hole-by-hole description, come hell or high water, you've got another thing comin'!"

I'll add links to each show and tell thread to the post with all of the aerials in order to facilitate finding them more easily. For individual comments feel free to post on those threads, but if general discussion and discussion of multiple contestants could be done on this thread, it would make it easier for folks to follow.


Also, I plan on hopefully having the results available tonight.


Great job everyone!

[Ian Andrew]

Charlie,

I'm not sure why I could not open the files - so I'm sorry I had to bail out on the judging - but I could only see one entry.

When I worked for Doug, we were one of the companies selected to submit an entry - and I still did not recognize the site - although that was a long time ago and Doug did the routing.

Good choice of sites.

Best,

Ian

[Charlie Goerges]

No problem Ian. I didn't have any idea so many archies submitted on that site. I'm glad I chose it, but what would have happened if I'd chosen Merion!?!?!? I shudder to think.

[Garland Bayley]

No problem Ian. I didn't have any idea so many archies submitted on that site. I'm glad I chose it, but what would have happened if I'd chosen Merion!?!?!? I shudder to think.

The thought crossed my mind that you might have chosen Merion, but the acreage was too much for that to be. I actually looked on Google Earth to see if you had chosen Shinnecock, or the Rawls course. Interesting that the judges compared some designs to Shinnecock.

Did I really mispell think like you have it above?

[Charlie Goerges]

Did I really mispell think like you have it above?

Probably not, I was typing from memory, so you may not have typed it quite like I did either.

However, I don't seem to be able to locate the misspelling either, perhaps I really am losing it!

[Garland Bayley]

...
However, I don't seem to be able to locate the misspelling either, perhaps I really am losing it!

If you are using a spell checker, it won't find it either as thing is a perfectly good word.

[Charlie Goerges]

Yep, I'm lost. The one place I see the word thing is the second to last word of the quote. I thought that word was supposed to be thing. Am I nuts?!?!

Don't answer that.

[Garland Bayley]

Let me quote my mother for you.

"If you think you can get away with that buster, then you have another think coming."

You see, it is not supposed to be thing.

But, we digress.

[Mike Nuzzo]

I want to see all the other architects preliminary routings.

Why didn't H&F put a single par 3 from 14 green to 17 tee and keep the bye hole?
Problems with a returning 10?
Are 15 & 16 both that good?
Back to back par 3s twice is something I wouldn't do.

Would the USGA ignore a course if it didn't have returning 9s?
They start off the back now too.

[Garland Bayley]

I'm pretty sure the USGA has used an out and back routing and ferried players out to 10, and back from 9.

They certainly did it for the Women's open at Pumpkin Ridge.

Part of the reason I remember that is the infamous Michelle Wie bumping incident was at the separate scorer's tent off the 9th green.

[Charlie Goerges]

Mike, 15 is a short par 4.

Also, I believe I saw on a thread here recently that they are not going to use the 7th hole in the US Open, in favor of using the bye hole.

At any rate it seems that returning nines seem to be a prerequisite (edit: Garland proves me wrong once again ). Though (generally speaking) I don't think they need be, as long as the 10th tee is not in some terribly far away place, they should be able to manage.

[Ian_Linford]

#10 at Pebble Beach is pretty darn far away...

[Jim Colton]

I want to see all the other architects preliminary routings.

Why didn't H&F put a single par 3 from 14 green to 17 tee and keep the bye hole?
Problems with a returning 10?
Are 15 & 16 both that good?
Back to back par 3s twice is something I wouldn't do.

Would the USGA ignore a course if it didn't have returning 9s?
They start off the back now too.

Mike,

  I think 15 is one of the best holes on the course and probably one they wanted to make sure was incorporated into the final routing.  I have no idea what the thought process was in the final design...I'd love to hear more about it (part 2 Dana Fry interview?)  Maybe certain parties really wanted the 15th, the Dell and the 10th green and they had to work around it.

  Charlie, when I was out there last year there was talk of building a second course.  The starter told us Bob Lang was already carving out a routing (he also told us that Mr. Lang 'basically designed the first course', so take his comments with a grain of salt.)  The website says they have 650 acres.  Maybe it's a good candidate for the next armchair contest.  You do realize that you volunteered yourself as organizer for a lifetime term, don't you?