It’s more about the $$$ than we think

[Mark_Fine]

Very few architects work without a budget whether it be for new courses or to restore or renovate existing ones.  I can assure you if money wasn’t an issue, most architects (from the past or present) would have done or would do things differently with their designs or course improvement projects.

Some things to ponder:

- Many of us for example like quirk.  But quirk is sometimes a result of the lack of funds to remove it. Maybe that is a good thing, but think about that. 

- Chocolate drops were often a way of saving money to avoid hauling rocks and debris offsite.  Instead of incurring that added time and expense they just piled them up, covered them with dirt and grassed them over. 

- Back when fairway irrigation was first introduced, fairway widths particularly on existing designs were reduced to the width of the throw of the sprinkler heads. Sometimes it was just a single irrigation line running down the middle of the hole corridor that determined fairway width.  It was too expensive to run multiple lines. Even today, restoring fairway widths is often limited by irrigation. 

- Trees were often planted or not planted depending on what species was available and what was “affordable”.

- If rock was discovered where a bunker was supposed to go, the architect often just relocated the bunker or eliminated it.  It was too expensive and time consuming to remove the rock. 

- Ponds to collect runoff and/or for irrigation purposes were/are sometimes necessary if not mandatory regardless of whether the architect liked them or not.  Drilling a well or using city water might not have been an option.

- The value of prime home sites often outweighs the value of prime golf holes which impacts course routings,…

- Smaller greens and fewer bunkers are less expensive to build and maintain.

The list goes on.

Thoughts? 

[Wayne_Kozun]

Some of these issues can apply to existing courses.  Over the last decade or two many courses here in the Toronto area have had to put in irrigation ponds as they were no longer allowed to draw water from rivers and creeks.  Do the irrigation ponds get incorporated into the playing area of the course or does them club have the space to have it hidden away? 

[Ally Mcintosh]

On a really good site, a lack of budget can drive more creativity in design solutions and in the end, a more natural product.

[Rob Marshall]

Can’t remember were I first saw chocolate drops. It was either Glens Falls, Teugega, or Transit Valley. Memory is going with age…..

[Mark_Fine]

Wayne,
Good point about the ponds.  Sometimes the architect has no choice because the costs to put it where they might prefer are too expensive. 


Ally,
Yes always two sides of the coin.  Lack of budget definitely spurs creativity, to do more with less.  But I still believe there are more compromises made to accommodate budget or lack there of.


Rob,
Quite a few older courses have chocolate drops.  Some are better done than others.  My point is that most of the time this was just a creative way to save costs.  Hauling rock is not cheap even today and you can’t always bury all of it. 

[Tim_Weiman]

Mark,


Many rocks had to be cleared when Pelham Country Club, the site of the 1923 PGA Championship, was built, but the course opened with no chocolate drops.


So was there a financial reason? Was there a better, more economical option than leaving the rocks on site?


I believe there was: the rocks were used to build homes in Pelham Manor, including several within a mile or less of the club.


Tim

[Mark_Fine]

Tim,
You might have found an example where the architect was saved vs hindered by the need to build homes 

[Tom_Doak]

On my first handful of designs, there was a need to build an irrigation pond because the wells didn't deliver enough capacity to water the golf course in 8 hours, and I was resigned to the idea that if there was going to be an irrigation pond it needed to be a feature of the course.  This resulted in holes like the 18th at High Pointe, the 2nd at Beechtree, and the 16th at Black Forest.


When we started on Apache Stronghold, I just couldn't get past the idea that it was awful to play a hole around an irrigation pond in the desert, and the Tribe had plenty of land, so we built the pond around the corner from the 7th fairway where it was out of sight and out of mind.  After that, I am trying to think if I ever again built an irrigation pond that was a feature of the golf course?  Maybe once or twice, but I can't think of where.  It was like a light bulb went off in my head, you don't need to do it.


I have been lucky to build several golf courses in recent years without a budget -- Tara Iti, Te Arai, Lido, Sedge Valley, Pinehurst #10, and Childress Hall among them.  All of those clients were familiar enough with me and with what it took, that they just put a round number on it and were confident I wouldn't exceed it.  [I'm told we are $2 million under what they thought at Childress Hall, and I kind of feel like a chump that we didn't charge them more for that.]  It is really the ultimate luxury not to have to think about it, but it became a problem when the clients at High Pointe and Sandglass asked a lot of questions about the numbers and we no longer knew the price of eggs!  I had to ask my clients at Pinehurst and Sedge Valley what we had actually spent -- and I thanked them for not bothering me about it.


I do think Ally is right, that budget constraints often produce more creative solutions.  But I'm always leaning that way to begin with, I'm not the kind of designer who insists on blowing through rock in order to add a bunker.  My highest-ranked recent course was the one with the lowest construction budget -- St. Patrick's.  So, no, Mark, it's not about the $$$.

[Mark_Fine]

Tom,
Maybe you meant to say “it is not always about the $$$” 

Even you have to admit, budgets often impact what you can do or can’t do (at least for most of us) who are not working on courses or at clubs with unlimited finances.  What do you tell a GM or owner or committee who says, “We can’t afford to maintain all these bunkers.”  Or “Adding more fairway is not an option because we don’t have the money to maintain it and add irrigation lines/heads etc to water it”.  Or “Managing an extra acre of green surface to restore the original putting surfaces to the edges of their fillpads is just not financially feasible.”  These type of financial constraints limit what we can often do on restoration and renovation projects.  We even have trouble taking down unwanted or unnecessary trees because there is no budget to remove them.  Many projects are done little by little as money becomes available.  This is challenging because you often have to work with different construction crews, different materials (sand availablity for example can vary year to year),… Often the money is not there at most projects to fully implement a master plan in total like it is at high end clubs. 

Lack of funds definitely can increase creativity as well as the need to be efficient but it also can very much limit what can and can’t be done.  Those who don’t see this or agree with this are very lucky. Few of us have that luxury and I believe this has been the case for most of golf’s existence. 

By the way, I am by no means saying architects would all spend more money if they had it.  Some might, some might not.  I believe most spend it like it is theirs, at least I do, and are pragmatic and well aware of the impact of what they are doing/spending.

Even Tom Fazio was well aware of expense when designing and building Shadow Creek.  Until he confronted Steve Wynn about how much it would cost for the course to “look like the model” and Wynn told him “Did I give you a budget”,   even Fazio was aware of what he was spending. 

[Matthew Lloyd]

This reminds me of filming JAWS - luckily for all involved they didn’t have the money or technology to make the shark appear more.


It seems that a lot of beloved features on old courses were a product of necessity.

[Mark_Fine]

Matthew,
You make a great point about many beloved features on old courses.  They are often there because the money wasn’t there to do things differently.  Architects became good at being frugal and efficient.  Think about the first courses.  Very little money was spent.  You simply used what was there. 


I always loved Flynn’s quote about trees.  He once said “Even the canny Scots would have left the trees on their courses if they existed as they were too frugal to remove them.” This was Flynn’s defense about using/incorporating trees on sites he encountered that had them.  This all goes to show that $$$ (often lack there of) had more of an impact on courses than most realize and maybe sometimes for the better,…

[Ally Mcintosh]

Mark,


I agree that most architects try and design with lower cost in mind. But there are different levels of that.


I have seen a lot of wasteful spend time and time again on good sites. Very often, if the budget had been capped a lot lower, much less would have been done and the end course would have been better.


To Tom’s point, it’s a philosophy to do as little as possible to get the best product. But when you are really tight for cash and/or time, innovative thinking goes beyond design in to creative construction phasing and use of on-site materials. It can be a blessing.


All of that acknowledges that sometimes, money is needed to fix things.

[Simon Barrington]

It seems that a lot of beloved features on old courses were a product of necessity.

Thus certainly applies to that quirky (and for some loved and others vilified) feature on Victorian/Edwardian Golf Courses the "Cop Ridge" (aka "SteepleChase Ridges")

Whether a ridge alone or preceded or followed by a grass dip, ditch or sand bunker these were products of necessity.

These were the result of designers having to find holes amongst small parcels of agricultural land bounded by hedgerows.

There were no stump grinders or heavy equipment for removal, so they simply buried the row of stumps and roots.

They became synonymous with inland golf which was booming and many including Tom Dunn began to overuse and even create these where hedges hadn't existed. Too much of a good (or bad) thing!

Necessity, as Ally & Tom said, is the Mother of Invention; perhaps overuse was/is the mother of mediocrity?

[Thomas Dai]

atb

[Mark_Fine]

Ally,
No question money can be wasted but with all due respect you darn well know money can have a MAJOR impact on what gets built or doesn’t get built. 

I wonder what Tom would have done differently at Memorial Park if he had one less zero in the budget?  How would Winged Foot and Merion and Baltusrol have turned out with one less zero?  If anyone says the same or better, why was all that money spent?What would those architects do if they had a $600K budget to do a complete renovation?  How would Yale for example turn out if that was the case?

Money has a huge impact on golf course design (and we haven’t even begun to talk about golf course maintenance budgets). What would Augusta National look like if they had the annual maintenance budget of my public courses ($450K)?  By the way, does anyone here know what most top courses spend to maintain their designs? These courses should look and play phenomenal with that kind of money spent. 

Creatively definitely gets challenged when budget is a factor but it can get old as well.  It gets tiring for example when you have to worry if you have enough sod left in the budget to get the tie-ins right when doing grading for a new or restored bunker. Some never have to be concerned about that which is lucky for them. But when you are out there laying and pinning down sod yourself because there is no more money for labor, this kind of thing hits home.

The point of this thread is not to complain, it is just to remind everyone that the courses we all play today are and were very much impacted by what was spent (how much or how little) to build and maintain them.  Might keep that in mind when judging what’s there

[Ally Mcintosh]

Not disagreeing, Mark. It is pretty much a given that money has resulted in increasing the standard of presentation.


Money also enables some bold design decisions and adds immeasurably to widen the choices, particularly on poor to average sites.


But design & build costs on many of our classic courses was some times very small. On those kind of natural sites, I’m arguing that budget is not always necessary to create “great”. And it can actually hinder, unless the architect has an overarching philosophy of minimalism. In which case he won’t get lazy and/or let temptation get in his way.

[Mark_Fine]

Ally,
We agree! 


There’s an old thing about money. Money doesn’t necessarily make you happy but the lack of money can sure make you unhappy 


This goes for golf architecture as well! 

[Tom_Doak]

There’s an old thing about money. Money doesn’t necessarily make you happy but the lack of money can sure make you unhappy 

This goes for golf architecture as well!

You certainly do seem to want it both ways . . .
(a)  I come up with great creative solutions for modest budgets, and
(b)  (sniff) . . . if only I had more money




I have been working in this field for 40+ years and I honestly do not ever remember thinking I needed more $ to build something.  We took it upon ourselves to do however much shaping was necessary and did not charge more for that piece.  We did not make as much $ as we should have in some cases, but the product never suffered for it, and ultimately that's why we have clients now who aren't worried about the budget.  Honestly, I spend more time worrying about the budget than those clients do; although I did learn my lesson from Julian Robertson that I should not worry about the budget until the client expressed worry about it.


Obviously you can't do everything for free; it takes $ to do good work, although I have consistently lamented how that $ is being driven up to $$$ by people who want to make more on the margins.


But it's always best to tell the client what you think they should really do, and make THEM be the ones who compromise.  You're really daring them not to, and often they find the resources [or the guts] to pull it off.


I am NOT talking about the old sales approach of "if you have to ask the price you can't afford it," which is being used in the USA way too much today.  I am a conscientious objector to $15M renovations and that's why I'm out of that business now.  I'm talking about a place like Dornick Hills, who when they first called, told me they couldn't afford to rebuild the greens.  I told them I understood, but I was only going to honor my offer to do my work for free if they did the greens, because that was 90% of what they had lost.  In the end, it was Perry Maxwell's family that put up the $$ to restore the greens and bunkers, while the club put in their new irrigation system. 


And I get sad when I think you could do three or four more projects like that for the $15M that some rich club is wasting right now.

[Erik J. Barzeski]

The point of this thread is not to complain, it is just to remind everyone that the courses we all play today are and were very much impacted by what was spent (how much or how little) to build and maintain them.  Might keep that in mind when judging what’s there

So should we say "This is a better course per dollar spent to build it than the famous course down the street?" Of course money affects things: beyond stating the obvious, I'm not sure I get your point.

Is it that your work (or some work by others) should be judged differently than the work of the bigger name architects? Should the golfer care how much was spent and what the maintenance budget is? A course nearby me gets really inexpensive water and pays for a year what another course nearby pays for a month — but both water about the same and have similar conditions. Should I factor all of that in when I consider how much I like either course? Should golfers have to consider what the site looked like 10, 40, or 80 years ago before a golf course was on it in judging the course?

[Kyle Harris]

Uh, duh?

[David Wuthrich]

On my first handful of designs, there was a need to build an irrigation pond because the wells didn't deliver enough capacity to water the golf course in 8 hours, and I was resigned to the idea that if there was going to be an irrigation pond it needed to be a feature of the course.  This resulted in holes like the 18th at High Pointe, the 2nd at Beechtree, and the 16th at Black Forest.


When we started on Apache Stronghold, I just couldn't get past the idea that it was awful to play a hole around an irrigation pond in the desert, and the Tribe had plenty of land, so we built the pond around the corner from the 7th fairway where it was out of sight and out of mind.  After that, I am trying to think if I ever again built an irrigation pond that was a feature of the golf course?  Maybe once or twice, but I can't think of where.  It was like a light bulb went off in my head, you don't need to do it.


I have been lucky to build several golf courses in recent years without a budget -- Tara Iti, Te Arai, Lido, Sedge Valley, Pinehurst #10, and Childress Hall among them.  All of those clients were familiar enough with me and with what it took, that they just put a round number on it and were confident I wouldn't exceed it.  [I'm told we are $2 million under what they thought at Childress Hall, and I kind of feel like a chump that we didn't charge them more for that.]  It is really the ultimate luxury not to have to think about it, but it became a problem when the clients at High Pointe and Sandglass asked a lot of questions about the numbers and we no longer knew the price of eggs!  I had to ask my clients at Pinehurst and Sedge Valley what we had actually spent -- and I thanked them for not bothering me about it.


I do think Ally is right, that budget constraints often produce more creative solutions.  But I'm always leaning that way to begin with, I'm not the kind of designer who insists on blowing through rock in order to add a bunker.  My highest-ranked recent course was the one with the lowest construction budget -- St. Patrick's.  So, no, Mark, it's not about the $$$.

Tom,


Texas oilmen don't usually have budgets, just whatever it takes to get the oil out of the ground!!   

[Kalen Braley]

This topic comes up every couple of years, and we always struggle with it, rightly so.

Most of us have the default setting of "the more you pay for something, the better it is", and while this may often be the case, you don't have to look far to find exceptions.  Like my car mechanic  from years ago who had reasonable prices and did excellent, timely work.  The kind of guy who once when my car was making gawd-awful noises, topped off the power steering fluid and sent me on my way no charge instead of a $150 service fee.

I really appreciate Tom's candid comments in here, and perhaps in part he gets so many good gigs because future clients know he won't be gouging them.

[Mark_Fine]

Kalen,
It is a tough subject and one that is easy to struggle with.  Back in the 80’s and 90’s when I was traveling constantly and playing golf everywhere, I never really thought about the consequences to a course as a result of architects having to deal with a budget.  But once I started dealing with budgets myself and realizing how impactful $$$ can be on what I could or couldn’t do, it made me appreciate and reflect on things differently.  Doing extensive research for our Hazards book also lead to many discoveries about what architects had to face on a wide variety of sites and how they handled the costs associated with the challenges. 


Let’s face it there are some massive budgets out there these days that are given to very knowledgeable and highly respected architects.  Do they really need those kind of budgets and if they had one less zero in their budgets how would those projects turn out?  Yale is underway right now.  Anyone care to guess what is being spent on that one?  Great for Gil but $$$ Definitely impact results. 

[Craig Sweet]

Fake quirk is a waste of money in my opinion.  And I'd rather play a course that was humble and not trying to be a "championship" course to sooth a rich man's ego.

[Mark_Fine]

Craig,
You mean like Yale