Beauty and golf architecture

[BCrosby]

B. Darwin, The Times, 1924:

"It ... is a regrettable fact that to talk too much about the beauty of a golf course is to damn it with exceedingly faint praise. There is always the suspicion that the purely golfing qualities of the course must be less than beautiful."

There is also little doubt that Darwin believed the same "suspicion" would apply to "too much talk" of the beauty of a bunker or other features of a golf course.

Bob

 

[Peter Pallotta]

Bob: oh, to write - and think - as clearly and effectively as Mr. Darwin did; a consummation devoutly to be wished.

But there's also an unintentional challenge in his words, for today's equivalent would be "It is obvious that to remark too enthusiastically about a well-conditioned course is to irrevocably damn it for manifesting neither quality architecture nor the right kind of (natural) beauty; as well as to permanently and unenviably tag oneself amongst your gca.com brethren as that most pitiable species of sportsman, the average golfer".

Peter

[BCrosby]

Peter -

Your modern paraphrase of Bernardo is one of the reasons I thought his quote was interesting. It is too often the case these days that when talk turns to the quality of a course, the talk is about its conditioning or beauty. Full stop. That's the case not just with your golfing buddies but also in the mass circulation golf magazines.

Unlike Darwin's time when Darwin himself or MacKenzie or Simpson or Travis or Croome or Low or Behr or Thomas or Tillinghast or others were writing regularly for the big golf mags, we have no modern commentators of similar quality. Today's public discussions of gca are almost totally devoid of talk of a course's "golfing qualities". 

Instead we get simple two column inch descriptions and full page color photos taken in a soft sunset light. What little information being conveyed to the reader is all about aesthetics and conditioning. Which is a serious disservice to the modern golfing public.

A marker for the change in how gca is handled in magazines today is that it is rare that hole diagrams appear. They do them for major tournament venues during the run up to the event, but not as part of the discussion of 'Best New', etc. Hole diagrams force attention on what Darwin called "golfing qualities" of the hole. They tell us almost nothing about the hole's beauty or conditioning. Ergo the mags don't use them much.     

Bob

P.S. I've often wondered about the relationship between the skills needed to be a talented golf architect and the skills needed to write reasonably well. There were/are a remarkable number of highly talented archies who could/can write well. Coincidence? I think not. 

[Niall C]

BMS

I took the quote to mean that in describing a course as being merely beautiful you are tacitly acknowledging its lack of functional quality.

Bob

That's a very interesting quote from Darwin. In a way you could draw a parallel with his own writing, always beautifully written but often short on real content. Perhaps not surprising given his prodigious output.

With regards to the lack of design content in modern golf publications compared to back then, I suspect there's a number of reasons. Firstly, I suspect that the likes of Simpson and MacKenzie made a reasonable return on writing articles for publication. Not only would they get paid by the publication in question (I imagine) but it would perhaps be the finest way of advertising their wares. I'm not sure that would be the case today or that gca's would be given the same opportunity in the mags to write in the same way.

Secondly, the print industry and indeed you could include the internet as well, seems to be more focused on the visual rather than expressing ideas IMHO. No doubt publishers would argue that they are merely responding to consumer demand. That being the case, I suppose the decline started with the use of photographs and continued as photographs got better and evetually going from balck and white to colour (although you can count me as one who loves the old black and white photos).

Niall 

[Tom_Doak]

Niall makes a good point.  Diagrams are visually interesting, too, but once the magazines went to color, the battle of diagrams v. photos was largely over.

I disagree with his point that architects aren't given the opportunity to write in the magazines if they want to.  I think I have that opportunity most any time I want it, however years ago it was suggested to me that writing for ONE magazine meant less coverage in all the OTHERS, and possibly affected one's standings in the course rankings of others, too.  So I stopped writing regularly.  The only thing that holds architects back from writing more today is whether they have the ability to write well ... most magazines still do have some standard in that department.  In fact, magazines are lazier than ever; many will print articles verbatim as submitted by advertisers in this day and age, and they certainly don't pay very much per word.

[BCrosby]

BMS -

Good point. Darwin is not saying that a beautiful course can't be a good course. Nor did I mean to suggest that. Rather he is saying that too much talk about a course's beauty (and these days, conditioning) raises suspicions that other, more important "golfing" qualities are absent.   

The application of Darwin's thought to our times is that talk about beauty and conditioning, whether with your golf buddies or in golf magazines, tends to foreclose talk of more substantive architectural issues. I can forgive my golf buddies for that. It is harder to forgive people who purport to be experts on architecture who write for the major golf mags.

To Tom's point about glossy color photos being more appealing than two dimensional ink drawings: Of course they are. But that shift has come at a price. It is one of the reasons why the quality of architectural discussions in those mags is now so degraded. The shift to beautiful color photos means that what people see about new courses is their beauty and conditioning. Which carries the unstated assumption that such things are all that really matter and all that their readers really need to know about these courses.

Golf architecture is much more interesting than that. But you won't get that from Golf Digest or Golf.
 
Bob

 



   

 

[Colin Macqueen]

Gentlemen,

I can only speak for myself but apropos of Niall's and Tom's point regarding glossy photos versus pen&ink sketchings I have found this.

In articles or books containing the line drawings I have to dwell on the sketches for longer just to get a feel for what is going on. I am forced to focus more intently on what is in front of me in deciphering the general topography and the architectural  point being made. Sensory overload and instant gratification in the form of coloured, dramatic golf-hole photography does, without a doubt, reduce the amount of actual thinking I do in regards to the architecture of a hole.
Maybe I should just try harder!!

In my golfing world talk "… about the beauty of a golf course…" doesn't necessarily  "… damn it with exceedingly faint praise…." rather, in agreement with you BobC, it will ofttimes prevent the chat being parlayed into discussion of the course's or hole's architecture.

Cheers Colin

[cary lichtenstein]

Show me a drop dead beautiful woman, and I'll show you a husband that's fxxxking someone else behind her back.

[Ally Mcintosh]

With regards to writing in magazines, I've been let away with surprisingly niche architecture articles in mainstream mags over the past number of years....Usually it's the only article that supplements equipment, teaching and the professional golf circuit.

I take Darwin's quote the same way as Brian does. Darwin is stating that beauty was a byword for lack of quality but that in his opinion beauty and quality can actually go hand in hand.... It supposes an intelligence and understanding of architecture in the writer and reader that doesn't exist in this day and age.... Nowadays, there is no reading between the lines. If a writer calls something beautiful, that is usually his way of describing his own view of excellence... and most readers correlate beautiful with excellence even more so.