[Ben Hollerbach]

The threat After the Lido...What is the next best lost course in North America? has illustrated the potential for what has transpired in Wisconsin to be repeated time and time again, to recreate all the lost classics that are no longer restorable. This has reflected a tone that the greatest future benefit of the Lido project is in this direction, but to me I don't see it that way.

It seems the greatest future potential derived from the Lido is in a stronger utilization of computer aided design and simulation in the design process. The flexibility to work in a digital space that is directly translatable to a physical course. And the ability to test a vast number of design concepts with very low cost.

The ability for an architect to develop concepts and ideate in a home office, test those concepts with their clients in simulators, and then when its time for construction, export the contour data in a way that can be utilized by gps guided shapers to bring the digital concept to life would seem to present a very positive shift in the design/build process.

I'd love to hear from Tom and Peter on this:
Tom, has the process around building the Lido impacted your way of thinking around design creation?
Peter, have other architects reached out to about to utilize CAD data in a similar execution? 

[Tom_Doak]

Ben:


Brian Zager, who helped out so much on Lido, is helping me with the planning of a new project in Florida now, and I expect to let him run the job and try to get the contouring as close to perfect in the computer as he can, to see how well it can be done.


I still expect we will want to re-shape significant portions of the course after the GPS dozers put Brian's contours in place, but we shall see.


For me, the appeal of the technology is working on sites where the contours are quickly blown away; the GPS allows me to build a green whenever, and then put it back exactly the same when time comes for seeding, instead of having to make several trips so I'm there at just the right time for each green.


But I am still quite skeptical that you can do sculpture as well on a computer as you can in the dirt.

[Ben Hollerbach]

Thanks for the reply Tom,

I'd imagine the goal today is to use CAD to help develop a closer to final baseline, minimizing the amount of hand finishing work required in the field. I would agree that today it will be harder to sculpt a great green site digitally than it is in person, but as the practice becomes more common to start with a digital model, those modelers will only get better and better.

[Marty Bonnar]

Among the brilliant asides of working in CAD are the ability to create very accurate Bills of Quantities and Cut and Fill calculations. Not always perfect, but bloody useful in setting up Contracts - and, sometimes in, ehm, Contractual ‘disputes’!
F.

[Peter Flory]

I think that the main benefits of renderings in general are for sales.  Either to sell your design to the owner or for the owner to sell memberships or real estate to consumers.  Also, for clubs to sell restorations/ renovations to their members. 

Harris Kalinka is the Pro V of renderings and it gives the idea of how it will soon be photorealism:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gdI3QlRScIo

They are pricey (for good reason) and a lot of big projects use them.  Cabot St Lucia does for example.  That is a pretty ideal situation because prospective lot owners can see pretty much what they are buying without having to use their imagination. 

The shaping abilities in the digital environment at that level have no restrictions, other than that of the artist guiding it.  But the micro contours of the greens are irrelevant and presumably, none of this kind of rendering will be used in the actual construction.  The shapers will do as they see fit on the ground. 

Over the past few years, I've been doing a lot of renderings.  I think that the most useful ones are for architects who have been hired for renovation work and the memberships want to see what the architect is proposing before they start going in the ground.  It's been educational to show them what a new corridor looks like going in a different direction or what views look like with trees removed.  It provides a lot more comfort than 2D drawings.  But again, the actual micro details aren't relevant for these types of projects.  I import the CAD and/or LiDAR into the models and then do the finer sculpting in the style that the architect is going for.  When they actually do the work, they ignore the digital model and they do what makes sense. 

One other use that I've been doing is for restorations where you're using the digital model to photo match historical photos of greens and other features that are gone or altered.  Once the model and the photos seem to match from available angles, then it serves as a rough draft/ contour map for the architect to start with.  They will then fine tune that in the actual construction.  For this type of thing, it's really nice to be able to move the sun around, to change the focal length, and to move positions in order to match historical photos.  A lot of the Lido project was this type of thing. 

This tech has been around for a while now, but it's just getting to be higher definition.  Most of the established architects now are used to working without it and they don't need it to win jobs.  So, for someone like Tom Doak, it can be a waste of time or worse, can set expectations and box him in a corner- say if I did renderings for a new project of his and then he wanted to call an audible in the field and do something better than what he planned.  But, as he mentioned, having used it on the Lido project, he found an unintended benefit from it and will now use the "save as" feature.  That will allow him to sculpt something in sand once or do all the greens in a short time frame, and then lock them in digitally so that they can be restored as intended when the wind changes them.  Hopefully that will increase his efficiency and allow him to travel less so that he can continue to take on projects in distant locations without as much burnout. 

[Tom_Doak]

Among the brilliant asides of working in CAD are the ability to create very accurate Bills of Quantities and Cut and Fill calculations. Not always perfect, but bloody useful in setting up Contracts - and, sometimes in, ehm, Contractual ‘disputes’!
F.

Marty:


I think that in golf design, those "very accurate" bills of quantities are a false sense of security.  But maybe you know exactly what you want to build.  I don't.


I drew a set of plans for a course last month and one of my associates asked if it was accurate enough to use for estimating quantities for bunker sizes, green sizes, fairway widths, etc.  My answer was "God, no!"  Most of us tend to draw things "fat" because they look better . . . actual fairway widths on a drawing look anorexic and devoid of strategy, so we draw them probably 50% wider than they wind up.


Likewise, I do my estimates for green materials just by saying we will average 6000 square foot greens [or 5000 or 7500 depending on the style I'm going for], and for bunkers by choosing a number and an average size.  With that, we have a good "budget" we will aim for as we are building the course.


I have never gone very far wrong with this method.

[Marty Bonnar]

Tom,
I spent most of my career in the Public Sector. I’m going to assume we had a very different client base to you! Our normal process was for a community group to fundraise for a new or refurbed sports facility and for us to get a (very limited) budget to design and quantify in-house the materials, products, constructions, downtakings, etc, etc our parks/play areas/sports facilities would require. Our mandated procedure was then to place the job on the national supplier portal for interested pre-qualified Contractors to examine and bid for if they wished.
Naturally, there were always small contingencies, but to avoid them going wild we HAD to have a very firm grasp on what we were designing and specifying. Not ideal of course but quite an ‘interesting’ mode of operation!
Cheers,
M.


PS Producing a set of plans which couldn’t be used for estimating/quantifying would have been a complete waste of time! We would always do sketch designs before finalising things of course.

[Tom_Doak]

Marty:


I understand, but did you ever build a great golf course that way?  If Lido passes that test, it will be the first I know of.  But it cost $2m - $3m MORE to build than the course I’m building across the street, with its less precise plans. 🙃

[Ben Hollerbach]

Marty:


I understand, but did you ever build a great golf course that way?  If Lido passes that test, it will be the first I know of.  But it cost $2m - $3m MORE to build than the course I’m building across the street, with its less precise plans. 🙃

Tom,
That is very interesting to hear. How much of that difference is based on the original site prep vs. other factors?

[Tom_Doak]

Marty:


I understand, but did you ever build a great golf course that way?  If Lido passes that test, it will be the first I know of.  But it cost $2m - $3m MORE to build than the course I’m building across the street, with its less precise plans. 🙃

Tom,
That is very interesting to hear. How much of that difference is based on the original site prep vs. other factors?

It would be easier if I could make a table here, but I don’t know how, so let’s do it this way:


Line Item. Lido—Sedge


Clearing.  200ac - 120 (rough guesses)
Earthmoving.  1.2m yd3 - 150,000
Reshaped area   200ac - 40 (?)
Irrigation.  More-less
Etc.


Sedge is a better piece of land for golf, and Lido is not really a fair comparison- if it wasn’t for the history, there was probably a fair portion of the site we might not have had to shape.


But my general point to Marty was that when you try to plan on paper, you often wind up tearing up areas you’d leave alone otherwise, and then also you tear up other areas you didn’t think you’d have to.

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