If manmade lakes and ponds are a necessity in many developments, why not utilize them in the strategy of creating interesting designs?
Impossible, they are boring. They take away shots. How many shots have you made from the middle of a pond?
It is often in today's climate preferable for many architects to hide the irrigation pond out of sight to achieve an aesthetic effect, but could not the question be asked that the designer has been inefficient in utilizing the available natural/required resources to create strategy? Honestly, a sand bunker is much more out of place in most inland environments than a flooded space of land.
By all means a pond does not have to be a forced carry, but the excuse to say it doesn't fit into the landscape is but an opinion perhaps resulting in a lack of creativity?
Au contraire. It is the lack of creativity that uses the cheap trick of adding a pond.
My home course (clay-based) hides the retention pond out of sight; all the while there could have been multiple opportunities to place it in lower elevation, thus producing golf holes with greater options. It is not wise to waste a strategic resource by hiding it behind some trees just because it looks unappealing. With tongue in cheek, be like Fazio and try to make it look natural.
Charlie
I disagree that a manmade pond cannot be utilized to create strategy. If I am building a course in a sugarcane or corn field and want to recreate a Cape hole; then why not dig a pond. It creates strategy in that the golfer has to determine how much to cut the corner. And if that is not strategy I don't know what is. Simply saying that all manmade water hazards are boring because they leave no possibility of a recovery shot is illogical. High fescue leaves no chance of recovery, so to do gorges and cliffs, deep woods, and oceans; I guess those are boring too? Therefore the architect that employs these challenges must have no creativity. Rubbish.
If I may, I believe your opinion and Doak's distaste of manmade water is more aesthetical. You don't like how they look; and neither do I. But to say they don't create strategy is false. For better or worse, water dominates the players mind when confronted with it. Therefore, however a 'cheap trick' they may constitute, and often times the lesser designs rely overly on their penal nature, they nevertheless when creatively utilized are a useful resource in the mind of a great designer.
Charlie
From Ran's review of Old MacDonald.
"Ninth hole, Cape, 415/230 yards; The best Cape holes (the fifth at Mid Ocean, the eighth at St. Louis, the fourteenth at National Golf Links of America) feature a water hazard upon which the hole pivots around. Such all or nothing hazards provide intense interest that the bunkers and vegetation on the inside of this Cape hole don’t match. Conversely, the bunkers and gorse here better tempt the golfer into being greedy, making this version a delightful hole to play time and time again."
A pond creates mindless strategy, and eliminates more strategy than it creates. It is simply a flag that says don't go here. How mindless can you get. I can do without the "intense interest" in whether my ball is going into the pond or not.
You didn't answer as to how many recovery shots you have made from the center of a pond.
GJ,
I have never recovered from the center of a pond because there might be alligators, and worse, snakes in them, but the drowning of your golf ball does not equate to the drowning of creativity/strategy/options.
The BEST Cape holes, according to your quote, are ones that have water/ponds.
I do agree that we both prefer hazards that allow for recovery (for options). But I do not attribute the concept of options to be equal to the concept of strategy. Demands are part of life. And the golfer that shies away from demands are typically the same folk that equate obedience to a negative/oppressive reality. I have to change a diaper, therefore I am not free to express myself. Nonsense! True joy can be found in accomplishing the task set before me. Thus avoiding the pond on a golf course does not equate in some sort of enslavement over the player, but just the opposite. A true understanding of freedom, in this scenario of 'escaping the ugly water hazard' can be likened to a conquering over an object that was attempting to take away my freedom,,, or in this analogy, my $4 golf ball.
Thanks for the response
Charlie