Hungry Gathering Bunkers. Lost art?

[Norbert P]

"In making bunkers it is, of course, most important to avail oneself as far as possible of any help the natural formations of ground may give . . . For myself, I should always try to find a spot where the tendency of the run of the ball would be to lead to the bunker. This enables a smaller hazard to do the work of a much larger one, and it is only carrying out a principle which obtains on the older classic courses."

 Herbert Fowler from H. Hutchinson book. (Sourced from Tom MacWood's In My Opinion of the A&C movement)

 My questions are ...

  With the aerial game are architects today not as concerned with these principles of ball actions and bunker perimeter designs?  Examples?  Counter examples?  Are we losing track by concentrating on the visuals/maintenance/proper distances of bunkers and not their effectiveness as hazardous hazards?

[Doug Siebert]

Not lost, but certainly diminishing.  Those tiny little pot bunkers on Scottish courses wouldn't be a problem if you only had to worry about flying into them!

When my home course redid the greensites on some of the holes a few years back a really good job was done for this.  The effective size of some bunkers is much larger than the bunkers themselves, and they are larger in the places you want to be which guarantees you will make regular visits.

Its quite obvious someone put a lot of thought into it, which you don't see with the bunkering on 9 out of 10 courses in the US.  Usually it is as you say, only planned aerially.  And even if the land might naturally encourage bunkers livin' large, the thick rough invariably surrounding them insures you don't have much worry about going in other than the landing and the first hop.

To be fair, it takes more thought to do it right in the US than it does in Scotland.  Over there its easy to put in a deep little pot bunker in a low lying area and everything in a fairly large area will tend to fall into it, you see that all over.  Do that in most places in the US and you'll end up with a ball lost in a foot of water during the rainy season and playing out of heavy wet sand during the dry season (thanks to irrigation)

[paul cowley]

...we call them 'doodle bug bunkers ' after a local  burrowing insect that creates a cone shape gravity slope to lure its prey to the bottom and doom......talk about real play hazards in the insect world.

drainage is the most important consideration.........

[Norbert P]

  Thanks gents.

  I think of Bandon Dunes that uses this concept with the gently sloping surrounds that let the ball roll and find the Earth's gravity to doom.  8th hole comes to mind. 12th also has deadly banking to its maw.

  #2 at Pacific has two vortices in the fairway, as well.

 Irrigation, as you say, has a lot to do with the designs being effective or going unnoticed.

 I'll have to keep my eyes open wider for these features and conditions in the future.

 I don't think I should call my lady "doodle bug" any more but your description does sort of fit her evil ways.  "Ouch! There's that left hook again."

[W.H. Cosgrove]

I have always thought that gathering bunkers were a great feature.  Less expensive to maintain, completely frightening and diabolical.  

Why don't they work in the US?  Maintenance practices and irrigation are two of the problems.  Close mowing around bunkers can be problematic and as far as irrigation is concerned, if the ball doesn't roll it won't collect.  

Nothing like a ball screaming along the ground, taking a big left or right turn and ending up in the bottom of some GD bunker you hardly knew existed!

[A_Clay_Man]

I would assume for a majority of lower tier clubs, the use of bunkers to STOP bounding balls from nether regions, is an art that should be lost.

Hard to call it lost, when so many fine newer designs have seen the failings of the mediocre and corrected it. Riverdale dunes had a nice one on the 11th? (played it reversed) and fuhgetabout it at the Rawls course, this art has been found there.

[Norbert P]

 Speaking of diabolical bunkers, the one in the left side of fairway on 15, Narrows, Old Prestwick, has got to be its poster boy.  It's like a big black hole, gathering anything that comes near it.

[TEPaul]

I looked very closely with this subject in mind at Ganton G.C during the Walker Cup there this summer and a few other courses in Scotland and Yorkshire England. Of course, it was very dry in Europe this summer but nevertheless the mowing maintenance surrounding the bunkers over there is no different than their fairway cut. This makes the entrance of balls into bunkering very easy and it makes the bunkering over there far more effective and far more necessary to consider, particularly off the tee.

I really don't know exactly why America sticks to the rough collars around all their bunkers most particularly the in-coming side but they do and from research of old photos of this country it appears they always have.

Maybe it has something to do with that old agronomic adage that over here we're always trying to get grass to grow while over there they're always trying to stop the grass from growing!

[Tom_Doak]

In addition to the factors mentioned above, it's not often easy to place a "gathering" bunker in a spot where it is well visible from the tee.  Americans insist on their hazards being visible, but a lot of the famous "gathering" bunkers at Muirfield and St. Andrews are shadowy figures from the tee.

Those bunkers on the second fairway at Pacific Dunes gather a LOT more than I anticipated ... I love how they work, but it was partly an accident.  

Same goes for the pot bunker on the 14th green at Cape Kidnappers (the short 4 with the Road hole green).  We built it deliberately so that a ball which didn't make it up the slope in the green might roll back into the bunker, but it's brutally efficient ... I saw one player putt off the top tier of the green and into the bunker last week!

[Scott_Burroughs]

Mostly a lost art but a couple are at C&C's Chechessee Creek:

#12, the par 4 with the front and center bunker that funnels in:


#13, the short par 3 where my tee shot landed on the green
maybe 7 or 8 steps on, not far from where the pin is, and
rolled back into the bunker:

[SPDB]

Donald Steel employs the hungry gathering bunker often with impunity. At Royal St. George's the hungry bunker was Bjorn's undoing.

[Brian Phillips]

Slag,

Do you not think that the gathering bunker can only be used on a links type soil ie. free draining.  The courses that I have worked on are mainly clay based and you don't want to form the surrounding area of a bunker into it.  Because the water does not drain through the soil profile it will follow the fall into the bunker (if formed as a gathering bunker) and this causes washouts.

Brian

[Norbert P]

 Brian, that is a big consideration and have seen many flooded bunkers in these parts of America (western slope of Oregon) but with the proper French draining placed above and directing away surface water, I think that issue can be minimalized.  

Obviously there are too many scenerios to cover but there's got to be some fascination on the part of the designers to at least contemplete the possibilities.  

[Norbert P]

"... it's not often easy to place a "gathering" bunker in a spot where it is well visible from the tee.  Americans insist on their hazards being visible..."

  Tom, (or anybody) do golfers' expectations rein in artistic thought?  Seems a shame to have to trade off profundity with player assumptions.  
I guess that's why it's a business and not pure expressionism.

 Even in the Art world, most artists create with the intention to find or please a buyer so there is a common human trait that passes between the two mediums.  It must be an interesting challenge to balance reality vs idealism?

[Tom_Doak]

Slag,

Do golfers rein in artistic thought?

Just indirectly, I guess.  I can do anything I want on my next project, although if the client is a golfer, he may have something to say about blind gathering bunkers.

However, if I keep designing things golfers don't enjoy, I'm not going to go far in my career.  And I would certainly say that golfers and golf architecture critics are much less forgiving of unconventional design than they were 100 years ago ... though perhaps more forgiving than they were 50 years ago.

To pull off something really unconventional, you have to make it look cool and you have to make it work well.  Some guys today are really good at this ... Mike Strantz and Gil Hanse, for two.  But even Mike doesn't put many blind bunkers into play, because it's hard to make them pass either of those two tests above.  [I've seen less of Gil's work so I can't say for him.]

I love those bunkers at St. Andrews, but only because I know where most of them are.  I do wish we had more opportunities to build courses which people were going to play hundreds of times, so we had the benefit of the doubt for golfers to decide how interesting our features were and how well they worked on the basis of more than a single trip.  

What's really holding design back is not a lack of creativity ... it's a lack of understanding and long-term thinking on the part of golfers and critics.

[A_Clay_Man]

Dan and Daves blind beauty behind the center of the green of the short par 5 at Wild Horse is an acceptable use of a "gottcha". I would think there could be many other acceptable spots, especially on holes where everything is right in front of you. In these situations Why isn't something invisible (on your virgin trek) cool?

[Tom_Doak]

Adam,

I was speaking more of a fairway bunker that you don't know is there.  A blind bunker behind a green is more generally accepted, because most people assume you're not supposed to hit over a green.

Now, a bunker in front of the green and some fairway behind it so you don't have to flirt with the bunker, like the 14th at St. Andrews, that's cool too, but probably wouldn't be well accepted by the American golfer.

[A_Clay_Man]

Tom- Thinking about the third at SFGC. The bunker behind the Tarantula is totally blind and was really cool. But I smelled something was afoot so I played right.

[Norbert P]

 Thanks for the replies.  It's not exactly the blind bunkering I'm asking about, it's the obscured ground effects around them that engage us into design analysis.

 Here is a picture of a hole that many here may have seen...

   http://www.bandondunesgolf.com/.docs/pg/hole12.html
 (Sorry folks, I tried to modify link but I guess you'll have to Copy and Paste to address bar)

 It has, with absolute clarity, a sod-faced sand bunker on the left-front of the green.  It is obvious to any golfer that it should be avoided but the ground can easily get the mind reeling with possibilities.  The hole looks like it would accept a draw quite readily. Remember also that the prevailing wind on this hole from Spring through Fall is from the 4 o'clock position to the golfer, thus adding to the effect of the ball-gulping bunker. Also, there is the hard and fast conditioning.  These conditions make for more analysis and, as such, make the hole more interesting to realize its variable secrets.

 There are few places in America with as good of soil drainage for the ground game as Bandon but without proper thought on the ground, then golfers are conditioned to play the aerial game.  

  I am planning on making a trip to Lubbock this Spring to play Rawls and am looking forward to seeing the canvas.  Paint isn't what makes a great painting; it's the thousands of choices in the process of creating that gives art its value. If artwork is to be profound, it has to become a dialog between the artist and the gazer. If golf architecture is to be artistic, it has to be a provocative dialog between the designer and the player, and using the ground only involves the player more.  If the worth of the ground is forgotten, then the game will be forgotten.  

[Scott_Burroughs]

Slag,

If you want to post a pic directly, you need to post a link of
the URL of the pic itself (not the URL of the page containing
the pic), surrounded by [img ] and [/img], but take out all spaces.

Here's you pic of #12 at Bandon:

[Norbert P]

Thank you Scott.  I will try that next time; (I've filed your suggestion instructions).  Thanks also for posting the picture.