I have been told that some manmade landscape features, when looked down upon from above, are laid out in such a manner as to spell out messages, rude words or even depict 'interesting' activities or practices.
Anyone herein care to nominate examples of routings, partial routings, golf or golf related features etc that when viewed from above or from certain angles indicate something interesting or unusual, whether deliberate or accidental.
Thomas:
I remember reading an old brochure of Robert Trent Jones, Jr., from the 1980's, when he was building a course near the Pyramids in Egypt. It noted that the shape of the routing from the air looked like an ankh -- the Egyptian symbol of eternal life.
I'm not sure the course was ever built; probably not, seeing that Bobby has not died from the curse of the pharaohs.
As for the topic of this thread, I do most of the routing work for my courses, and I know that Bill Coore does most of his own, too.
I've certainly borrowed good ideas from my associates [usually, late in the process] to improve a particular corner, and I am trying to give them the maps earlier on so I can teach them something about routing courses. But I don't like to see any work from them until I've had a chance to look a the site with a fresh mind, because I will get stuck on some feature of theirs that I liked, and have a hard time looking at that portion of the property differently. [I don't like seeing what other architects have proposed, either, for the same reason.] I don't want ANY golf holes in mind when I'm starting, I just want to see what I see in the contour lines.
I guess Jeff and Lester don't have that problem; from their descriptions, they like to look at a whole bunch of different alternatives. I tend to focus on little pieces of the property at a time, find the solution for that piece that I like best, and then try to piece the sections together ... so I am always narrowing things down to an eventual solution, and you will usually find several holes from my first attempt at the routing in the final plan.
As I've mentioned before, too, I don't like to get feedback from the client on alternative plans. I don't want them to choose one plan over another because they get stuck on one particular hole they like [or, one they dislike, that they don't really understand]. I want to be the one that chooses. So, I'll just show them the plan I like, ask for feedback on it, and revise if necessary. I have made some big revisions at that point in the process, with great results; it's funny how fast a new solution can come together once you really know the ground. But you've got to get to know the ground first, and that's hard if you keep focusing on 100 different golf holes.