Should This Trend Come To An End?

[Grant Saunders]

The whole frilly/wavy edged bunker thing feels very forced and busy to me.

Is this a misguided attempt to somehow dupe the player into suspending belief and have them think that these bunkers are in fact natural?

Is it well time that this style is viewed in the same vein as line dancing and the mullet and best allowed to fade away?

[BCowan]

It bothers me almost as much as the blown out sand bunker look.

[David Schofield]

Looks totally natural to me...

[Ally Mcintosh]

It bothers me almost as much as the blown out sand bunker look.

Does a well executed blown out bunker really bother you as much as a jigsaw edge with clean finish?

I can understand people having had enough of both I suppose.

[Steve Lang]

Woodland Hills?


Billy Bell Sr design vintage 1925?  Did someone renovate??


What about the trees on the right???

[Jon Wiggett]

Grant,


it is becoming very over used and jaded in my opinion. Sand bunkers are an over used and lazy dodge for many designers instead of thinking about using the lay of the land with additional humps and hollows. Unless in a dune setting sand bunkers are always artificial. Frilly or ragged edges do not alter this. The big issue I have with the bunker in your photo is the thought has gone into the shape of the edging but none into getting the bunker to fit into it's surrounds leaving a very ugly flat top edge to the green pad and the bunker appearing imposed onto the landscape. Not a good look.


Jon

[Greg Gilson]

I agree with Jon...

...and I can only imagine how the ground staff enjoy mowing those tongues.

Ross Watson built a bunch of these on the Palms course here at Sanctuary Cove.

[Tom Bacsanyi]

I agree with Jon...

...and I can only imagine how the ground staff enjoy mowing those tongues.

Ross Watson built a bunch of these on the Palms course here at Sanctuary Cove.

The bunker pictured is an easy mow, a couple minutes with a flymower at most.  However, raking the flashed sand face along the frilly edge would be annoying. The real flymow headaches are huge, steep, grass faced bunkers.  Think any CB/Raynor design.  Luckily most of those clubs have massive budgets. Flymowing also sucks on big flashed bunkers with big noses extending down toward the bottom. 

I do think Coore and Crenshaw do very nice jagged bunker edges and it's sort of their signature, but everyone else should abstain from this look.

[Greg Chambers]

what if somebody on here found out it might have been one of Hanse's guys that built that bunker edge?  Would the tune change?

[Grant Saunders]

what if somebody on here found out it might have been one of Hanse's guys that built that bunker edge?  Would the tune change?

No, I would still feel the same about it.

Conversely, if this board were told Rees Jones did this, would there be strong opposition?

[Sean_A]

Grant


Its difficult to get that look in your pic to match the surrounds of a parkland course, but I am not tired of the look.  I am really tired of bunkers being used as a catchall for features.  Archies have to get smarter.


Ciao

[Thomas Dai]

I also note the fan at the rear right of the green. More unpleasantness. Needs must though......well I suppose so.
Atb

[Tom Bacsanyi]

what if somebody on here found out it might have been one of Hanse's guys that built that bunker edge?  Would the tune change?

Tune would not change, I assumed it was a Hanse bunker from the get go.  Whether it is or isn't is immaterial.  Bunker edges are just one small detail of a course, and fairly far down the list of what's important. Hanse is a great architect and builds/renovates courses that many of us would want to play.  I don't prefer his particular style of bunker edging.  Taking it a step further, Jim Engh's squiggly bunker shapes and edges drive me absolutely batty, but his courses are all so fun that on balance it really doesn't matter. Talk about flymowing headaches though!

[Mike_Young]

I do think Coore and Crenshaw do very nice jagged bunker edges and it's sort of their signature, but everyone else should abstain from this look.

What?  How long have you been in Mom and Dad's basement?  plenty of people know how to build a "jagged edge" bunker.  That bunker shown is a very formal bunker and is not a good example.

[Tom Bacsanyi]

I do think Coore and Crenshaw do very nice jagged bunker edges and it's sort of their signature, but everyone else should abstain from this look.

What?  How long have you been in Mom and Dad's basement?  plenty of people know how to build a "jagged edge" bunker.  That bunker shown is a very formal bunker and is not a good example.

You're right, looking back at the OP's picture I can now see the bow tie and cummerbund that the bunker is wearing.  A "formal bunker" indeed. 

[Grant Saunders]

Grant,


it is becoming very over used and jaded in my opinion. Sand bunkers are an over used and lazy dodge for many designers instead of thinking about using the lay of the land with additional humps and hollows. Unless in a dune setting sand bunkers are always artificial. Frilly or ragged edges do not alter this. The big issue I have with the bunker in your photo is the thought has gone into the shape of the edging but none into getting the bunker to fit into it's surrounds leaving a very ugly flat top edge to the green pad and the bunker appearing imposed onto the landscape. Not a good look.


Jon

Jon pretty much sums up my thoughts on this fairly well.

The busy lines of the edge in no way reflects the bunkers foreground, top edge or the gradient that leads into it.

Below is a bunker with an almost geometric shape and no excessive movement of the bunker edge yet to me, it has a much more natural feeling presence.

[Joe Sponcia]

Those trees shading the green are hideous.  I agree.  This trend should come to an end.

[David Cronheim]

Absolutely 100% yes. The theme that ties together many of the golf courses that we like on GCA is minimalism. On the surface, there isn't much in common between the type of modern courses praised here (e.g. the Bandons of the world) and the highly engineered older courses that we all seem to like (the Langford & Moreau, Raynor, Ross, etc). However, the common thread is efficiency in construction and moving as little dirt as possible to achieve a strategically interesting result.


The bunker above is moving dirt to make something appear natural. I dislike that look. If you go to see many of the UK courses that these bunkers are attempting to emulate, you'll notice that they're pretty ragged looking for the most part. They are beautiful and rough. The Americanized versions of them almost always seem way too manicured.


To my earlier point, the thing I've always appreciated about some of the Golden Age courses is that, for the most part, their bunkers are pretty simple affairs. If flashed up sand was an easy maintenance choice, they went with that. Conversely, it doesn't take a lot of skill to build big, flat bottomed bunkers with grass faces.


I think the jigsaw look is a silly because it falls into the category of design that I really dislike - man attempting to do something to look natural. Modern artificial mounding is perhaps the most obvious example of this man-doing-a-poor-job-imitating-nature philosophy. We never quite seem to be able to pull of the randomness of nature and so the results often look contrived to me. Obviously man-made is a lot less offensive to the eye than a poor or unrealistic imitation of nature.

[Jeff_Brauer]

Seems like the visually successful "chunked" bunkers have a lot less defined edge.  A clean edge and lots of angles looks too busy, to my eye.

As to the big question, I agree.  A few guys did it and it became fashionable to the point of boring, much like waterfalls and almost any other course design trend.  The entire shaggy edge bunker fad has, IMHO, favored visual design too much over other aspects.  And, unless done really, really well, it can be a visual fail.  Not to mention, not all golfers ever really liked it in the first place, it appeals to a select few (like perhaps, nearly any bunker style or design element.)

If form follows function, and any designed golf feature should consider (in approximate order) play value, visual effect, maintainability, I believe the jagged edge bunker fails in two, and possibly 3 categories.

For play, whoever misses closest to green could be absolutely screwed with an unplayable lie.  While they do occur, creating one purposely seems somehow wrong.  Slows play, raises scores, etc. Correct me if I am wrong, but didn't LACC remove the shaggy grass, if not shaggy edge of their bunkers sometime after re-opening for this reason?

For visuals, as discussed.  It's an artificial bunker, and thus the edging is an artificial edge.  Too busy, maybe.  Artistic? 
Maybe, but then so are simpler cape and bay bunkers.

For maintenance, as discussed, but clearly a headache to keep that edge long term.