The Armchair Architecture Contest...Cool idea for next contest - Please comment

[Charlie Goerges]

I always assumed that the greens would be shaped to work better than the land on which they were draped. We were not instructed to detail our greens in this contest. Unfortunately, some of the judges and readers did not make the same assumption, as mine were criticized for being too often too difficult, and too domed.

You assumed right as far as the contest was concerned Garland. It would have been prohibitively difficult to get into greens shaping. The judges were told the same thing, but they were obviously free to make their own rankings based on their own reasoning.


RE Ian's bunkers, his bunkers are at least as stiff a penalty as those surrounding Riviera's 10th. But with Ian's, if they don't get in the bunkers (a distinct possibility), they will run a long way from the green because of the short grass. That would leave a difficult up and down in my opinion.

[Charlie Goerges]

Just for giggles I thought I’d post my routing for the property. I began this long after the contestants had submitted their entries so any resemblance to said entries or wholesale theft of ideas is purely intentional!






I found it difficult to force myself to commit to placing bunkers, on most holes I did place some, some holes didn’t seem to need any, and on others I just couldn’t do it, even though I know a couple might be necessary for interest. Did anyone else experience this phenomenon?

I’d love to get some feedback, so please feel free to let me know what you think but feel free to ignore it. The holes are numbered and the yardages in the scorecard are from the back tees.

[Garland Bayley]

Do we have to rope up and put on crampons to climb up to your tees? 

[Ian_L]

Cool course, Charlie.  Since you didn't get any feedback I'll give you my amateur thoughts on your holes...

#1: I would have put the bunker on the inside of the dogleg rather than the outside, since that would seem to be the preferred line.

#2: I really like this hole.  It looks like the only  hole that could be drivable for the longest hitters.  The lone bunker looks like it would make a challenging pitch from the wrong side of the fairway to a green that slopes away at the front.

#3: I had a par 5 that was very similar to your hole.  The green was the same, but the tee was moved back and left.  I like the sidehill slope of the fairway, but I'm not sure about the bunker.  It would seem most players would want to avoid the left side anyway, so the bunker wouldn't be a desired spot.  You might consider lengthening this to a par 5 to avoid five two-shotters to start the round?

#4: I think this hole could use some bunkering.  It looks flat and straight to me, but maybe I'm missing something?

#5: I like how you used the ridge on this hole.  I think the second shot would be at least semi-blind, but you didn't put any trouble around the green so I think it works well.  You might have considered adding fairway to the right of the green to allow shots to be banked onto the putting surface (that's one thing I love on a course).

#6: Fun downhill par 3 with a scenic background.  What would you say to moving the green into the little hollow back and to the right?

#7: I like the green site and the diagonal carry on this hole.  Would it have been feasible to move your fairway more to the right to bring the steep drop-off into play?  That would provide for some interesting recovery shots over the hill.

#8: I like how the slope on the right can be used to kick a running shot onto the green.  I might cut down on the bunker size to make this shot more doable for shorter hitters.

#9: Cool par 5 here.  I like how you add interest to the second shot with your greenside bunker, asking players to lay up to the right.

#10: I like how this hole plays up the valley, and doesn't really require any bunkers.  Again, I might cut the fairway higher on the hill on the left to allow for shots to bounce down onto the green.

#11: Ah, the esker hole.  It looks like the left side is preferred off the tee if you want to reach the green in two.  My problem with the hole is that there's no danger around the green to make longer players think, and the esker doesn't seem to come into play for those of us who can't reach this green.  I'd love to hear your thoughts on this hole especially.

#12: I like this hole a lot.  It looks pretty difficult to hit over the first bunker but avoid the second (blind) one.  I might add a bit of fairway to the left for shorter hitters, since it slopes away and left.

#13:  Probably my least favorite hole.  It looks to me like a long, blind tee shot with bunkers on either side of the green you can't see.

#14: Nice strategy here.  Keeping the ball down the left avoids an long shot over a greenside bunker.  I like how you moved the middle tees to the right to give players a shot at threading the needle between the bunkers.  Looks like a challenging but fair hole.

#15: The bunkers don't seem to be in play for most golfers, but I to like the diagonal ridge on the fairway.  How long is that carry over the water?

#16: Nice use of the land here, asking players to bounce the ball onto the green from the left.  You might think about adding a bunker short and right to encourage players even more.

#17: I had a hole very similar to this on a previous drawing.  I really like your use of bunkering here to make every type of player think.  Definitely better than my version, and one of my favorites on the course.

#18: Very close to my 18th hole, although you've moved the tee back a ways.  I like your use of a large bunker here to grab the player's attention off the tee.  You might consider widening the fairway and placing a bunker down the right side to add to the strategy of the hole.

Let me know what you think!

[Garland Bayley]

Charlie,

From a brief look, it appears #11 is one of the better holes cornering around the esker and ending in a saddle. Unfortunately, I might be out of breath climbing to the tee, thereby preventing it from taking my breathe away.

[Charlie Goerges]

Do we have to rope up and put on crampons to climb up to your tees? 

Only if you're a girly-man! 

[Garland Bayley]

Without laying back 230 from the green, how would anyone keep their tee shot on the 18th fairway?

[Jim Colton]

Charlie,

  Nice work.  Your 11th looks like the best hole, and I like you managed the crossover with 3&4 and 7&8 successfully to get back to the clubhouse (I found this hard to do).  Like Garland, I'm not sure how the 18th works.  Come short of the hill and your approach is not going to be much fun...not the way I'd want to finish a round.  Also, your short par 4's don't really do anything for me...especially the 2nd hole.

  Jim

[Charlie Goerges]

I thought I had done a quick reply earlier, must have forgotten to click post...

Anyhow, thanks for the comments guys, I'll post something a bit later once the girls are asleep.

[Charlie Goerges]

Thanks again guys. I’m running a bit short on time, so I’ll have to hit the high points with you.

#2 Ian liked, Jim didn’t. I’d have to side more with Jim, as that bunker is pretty much blind from the tee. I wanted a short par 4 though, and I wanted number 3 where it is, so #2 was the result.

I liked number 3, here’s a shot from the tee. Yes the fairway bunker is a bit stupid, but I’m using the fact that I suck as an excuse.






Here is a shot of the green complex, I’m pretty happy with this one as the bunker fit in between some contour lines and became a bit of a gathering bunker.






Here’s #7, I think it has nice contour, but you’re right, Ian, it could use a bunker or two. I had to put the green where it is to keep the walks in this part of the course to a minimum.






Here’s 8, I’m glad you noticed my strategy with this one Ian, that’s what I was going for.






I thought the 11th was the best natural hole on my routing. Unfortunately putting a long hole in the middle of a piece of property can cut off a lot of other routes. Nevertheless I went with it. Garland, here’s a shot from the middle 11th tee toward 10 green (the flag is just sticking up above the back tee for 11). It’s not that far up. One thing that I did try to do was get greens half to three-quarters of the way up the slope if I was going to put a tee on the top. I didn’t always accomplish that, but you’ll see very few of my greens are at the absolute bottoms of slopes.

 



Here is the tee on 11 (that's the green over to the right over the esker).






Here’s a shot from the fairway toward the green, the huge undulations seem to make a good hazard.






Here’s a view from the 14th tee back over 11. (I agree Ian that more bunkers could have been used, but I just couldn’t decide where, so I didn’t put any). Oh and I do think the esker forms a bit of a hazard because to go at the green in 2 you should really get to the right side of the fairway which is the most direct route which puts the esker directly in front of you.






Ian, you mentioned that 13 was your least favorite. I thought it would be too, but when I draped it, the slope was much more gradual than I’d thought:






I’m pretty happy with 16:






Okay, everyone had something to say about 18. I agree it’s not ideal, but once I’d decided on number 11, it was almost a foregone conclusion that the 18th (or 9th if the nines were reversed) would be awkward. Basically because 11 pinches everything down where only one hole could run north of it, and one south of it, plus the pond only adds to the routing difficulty. But here is the view from the tee.






The view from the women’s tee:






This view from the crest of the hill shows that if you get to the crest or past, it’s not as difficult as Garland speculated to keep it on the fairway.






One last view looking back:







Thanks again for the feedback gents, I appreciate it. It is exceedingly hard to get a good coherent routing figured out for someone with no experience. And to think that the property lines that I drew on here gave us about 360 acres to work with. The old course is on 90, Merion East is on about 125. How did they do it!

[Ian_L]

Nice pictures Charlie, I think your course may be the most artistic of all.

Great green site on #3.  I like the effect of the bunker as you described.

#7 looks better in "real life" than I'd imagined.

#11 is WAY better than I'd envisioned.  I hadn't realized the massive scale of the undulations.  I like the collecting effect on the tee shot.

#13 isn't as bad as I thought, since it's not blind.  Still not a huge fan, though.

#18 still looks good to me.  I don't think the fairway would be that hard to hit at all.

[Garland Bayley]

One last view looking back:

Counting contour lines, that fairway drops 20 feet in this view. The view doesn't seem to show it. If you look at the left edge of what we see above, there is supposed to be a rather sharp 6 foot drop just off the fairway. The contours would seem to feed all short hitters balls into the bunker seen on the right. I think it would be a great par 5 if the tees were taken back to the edge of the property and you could stand on the top of the hill seen here for your second.

EDIT: It actually looks to me that the hole is draped off to the side of where it was drawn on the contour map.

[Charlie Goerges]

That 6 foot drop is still there, it just isn't visible from this view. And sketchup does often seem to "flatten out" hills visually, but they're still there and when measured they are correct, it's just a limitation of trying to display a 3D environment.

Overall, I agree it is an awkward hole though Garland. My only point was it wasn't so bad as to be unplayable. I did make some trade-offs in the routing because I had some favorite holes, and then I built everything else around those. The 3rd and 11th were my favorites and I just tried to make pretty much everything else fit.

I'm curious if you, Garland, or anyone else in the contest experienced the process like I just described or if it went another way. I know you said you took the first working routing, but even within that, was there a hole that just HAD to be in there?

[Garland Bayley]

Charlie,

You may remember from my thread that I sacrificed the 18th also. I routed 5 to 17; expected them to be 6 to 18; tried to route 1 to 5, but only came up with 4, because I liked 2 and 3 and didn't want to change them; and then tacked on 18.

Also, there was no way I was going to sacrifice #7,
 

[Jim Colton]

I'm curious if you, Garland, or anyone else in the contest experienced the process like I just described or if it went another way. I know you said you took the first working routing, but even within that, was there a hole that just HAD to be in there?

Charlie,

  I built around the first hole that I 'found', that risk-reward 4th hole around the pond.  The same one that I ended up scrapping when I caved to the USGA.  I like my new 3rd-4th hole combo a lot better than my old one.

  Re: your 2nd hole, I don't see any reason why any golfer wouldn't just swing for the fences and try to get as close to your green as possible. Even if you were 30 yards wide left or right of the green, you'd still have a very good chance at getting up and down for birdie.  There's no advantage to hanging back and playing safe and little incremental risk for trying to drive the green.

  I like your 3rd hole.  The real 3rd hole is one of my favorites at EH and I think it's very similar to yours.

  Jim

[Charlie Goerges]

Garland,

3 and 7 were probably my two favorite holes in your routing as well and that's why I profiled them. I think everyone had at least 1-2 good to great holes and everyone had 1-2 downright bad holes, and I think the contest was decided on whether the remaining ones were terribly indifferent, serviceable, decent etc (in the judges' estimation).

But it's interesting that this site has been roundly praised as a great site for a course, but all the amateurs produced at least some pretty bad holes. Leaving the varied opinions of Erin Hills aside for a moment, at least there weren't any "pretty bad" holes there, and I'd wager that most of would think that a good professional architect wouldn't produce any bad holes and a significantly higher number of good to great holes than the amateurs did. I wonder where the difference comes about? I wouldn't think it's just experience with designing courses, or all courses that were the first effort of a designer would be worse than subsequent efforts (obviously that would be somewhat site-dependent) and I don't think that's the case.

I'm curious as to what it could be.

[Garland Bayley]

Charlie,

All the amateurs have day jobs! Many of the amateurs have no experience with such software! I am sure I could do much better with more time and more software experience. I might even be able to get to next to last place.

[Charlie Goerges]

Good observation G-man. Time. Definitely one of the things of which I have too little.


Jim, for some reason I find it a little funny that the hole you decided on earliest is one of those you changed. But at least you were willing to let go of something in the name of improving the whole (plus we all know how much Garland hates water holes).

[Charlie Goerges]

Nice pictures Charlie, I think your course may be the most artistic of all.

Great green site on #3.  I like the effect of the bunker as you described.

#7 looks better in "real life" than I'd imagined.

#11 is WAY better than I'd envisioned.  I hadn't realized the massive scale of the undulations.  I like the collecting effect on the tee shot.

#13 isn't as bad as I thought, since it's not blind.  Still not a huge fan, though.

#18 still looks good to me.  I don't think the fairway would be that hard to hit at all.

I don't have any specific comments Ian, but what you said about numbers 7 and 13 underscore why I dragged sketchup into the equation. If we were all architects and could easily visualize what a topo map would look like in 3D we needn't have bothered with sketchup at all. But even after all the time I've spent looking at this particular map in both topographic and 3D views, I still get confused about how something would actually look just from seeing it on the topo map alone.

Well, I suppose it's about time to think about wrapping this thing up. It sort of feels like the end of a 3-day kegger (not that I know what that would be like) too much clean up and not enough forward momentum left. But fear not! A proper wrap-up will be had, and hopefully by the end of next week. The next order of business however will be our contest-improvement survey/questionnaire. Let me know how you'd like to do this. All ideas appreciated.

[Garland Bayley]

Good observation G-man. Time. Definitely one of the things of which I have too little.


Jim, for some reason I find it a little funny that the hole you decided on earliest is one of those you changed. But at least you were willing to let go of something in the name of improving the whole (plus we all know how much Garland hates water holes).

For more on water holes, see the Tommy Naccarato room to manuever around criteria on the design criteria thread.

[Charlie Goerges]

Okay, now is the time to wrap this thing up. Rather than drag it out, we’ll make it short and sweet. First, I want to thank the judges one final time.


Yannick Pilon “The Rebel”


“Papa” Paul Cowley


The Emperor Thomas Naccarato


“Agent” Jeff Brauer


Mike “it’s not Rocket Science” Nuzzo


Rich Goodale “The King”




And our Competitors in order of final ranking by the judges:

Andrew Gray

Dave Stringer

Jim Colton

Greg Davis

Tom Doak/Me Let it be known that I seriously dragged him down

Steve Lang

Ian Linford

Garland Bayley



I’m going to do a card of Andrew’s course (in process) and forward it to the judges for an autograph and a few words of encouragement. Once the judges have all signed it, I’ll forward it to Andrew for his archives. All of the competitors will be getting a card for their course once I get them all designed and printed.


I can’t tell everyone how proud I am of the competitors for the work they poured into this contest and of the judges for their scrutiny, effort (and let’s face it, any and all legitimacy that this contest had). For all of that I thank everyone involved.




Now, moving along, I think rather than try to come up with a fancy survey, I would ask everyone who feels so moved, to give their feedback on the contest; how it was run, the media through which it was conducted, and ideas on how it should be done next time.  Everything will be collected and before another contest occurs, the best ideas will be taken and applied.





A couple of notes, once this thread has fully wound down, I’ll do an abridged post with links to all of the pertinent materials/downloads so that there will be a quick reference to use for the next contest. Also, I’ll be doing a full write-up on Sketchup for GCA purposes that will be divorced from the contest because it’s been mentioned that it would be useful outside the confines of the contest.



Thanks to all, and best wishes.

Charlie

[Ian_L]

Thanks yet again Charlie for all your effort on this project.  It really was a fun exercise and one I would definitely participate in again (of course, you already know that).

One suggestion I would make would be to have a PDF manual similar to the one you made in the original Armchair thread, since the video tutorials are a bit long.

Also, I think a more uniform way of labeling holes and tees might be helpful.  I noticed there was some confusion on one of my holes because the judge was confused about which tee corresponded to which hole (he thought a par 3 was a par 4).  Maybe each participant could send in an Excel scorecard for the judge to use as reference, maybe with a few comments about plans for earthmoving.

Since I'm sure you need a breather from this mania for a while, you might consider just creating a new property in Sketchup for people to fool around on, without the hassle of managing the contest. Of course, I have no idea how time consuming creating a site is, so maybe this isn't feasible.  I know I can still have plenty of fun coming up with a new routing at Erin Hills.

Thanks again, Charlie. 

[Garland Bayley]

I would appreciate if some of those that drew artful holes could give a few pointers to Ian and I on how to do so. Unless of course Ian was channeling Kelly Blake and was drawing in his style, which he was somewhat successful at.

[Garland Bayley]

I'm wondering if a contestant qualification process would have helped. I.e., put out a small piece of land, do the tutorials and require a completed hole with the software, before starting the contest. It would have been helpful to be adequately competent with the software before the contest began.

[Charlie Goerges]

Garland, Ian,

Per your suggestions, I think I'll add a practice piece of land to my write-up on sketchup. I may stick with the one I had created earlier for the the time being (Sorry Ian, I know you've already worked that one over). I'll also try to have a better PDF tutorial that also covers some of the more artistic side of the equation.




Does anyone else want to have some input on what would make for a better contest next time? Any suggestion is fine, we're not guaranteed to use it, but let me know what you think. Especially if there is any aspect of the contest that kept you out of it when you would have preferred to be in.