Golf Club Atlas
GolfClubAtlas.com => Golf Course Architecture Discussion Group => Topic started by: Dan Herrmann on July 25, 2010, 08:25:20 PM
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I was driving around town this afternoon and got to talking with my wife Laura about what factors signify good golf architecture. She came up with a darn good list:
1. Green Complexes - strategic interest and lack of boring designs
2. Forced Carries - too many causes Laura to have no fun
3. Tee placement - how they set up angles, and the way the tee is canted to the ideal playing corridor
4. Bunker placement
5. "Doglegs" - how doglegs fit into the routing - left vs right quantity.
I thought that was a pretty good list.
What would your list look like?
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Dan:
1) variety;
2) unpredictability;
3) a sense of discovery;
4) a feeling of being at one with the land (in other words, minimal artificiality);
5) a sense of completeness -- that all facets of your game have been utliized and tested.
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I was driving around town this afternoon and got to talking with my wife Laura about what factors signify good golf architecture. She came up with a darn good list:
1. Green Complexes - strategic interest and lack of boring designs
2. Forced Carries - too many causes Laura to have no fun
3. Tee placement - how they set up angles, and the way the tee is canted to the ideal playing corridor
4. Bunker placement
5. "Doglegs" - how doglegs fit into the routing - left vs right quantity.
I thought that was a pretty good list.
What would your list look like?
Slow lead-in to my upcoming thread: Has your wife ever played Old Town? She may or may not like it. I hit the ball 300+ yards off the tee, so forced carries don't bother me, but there are numerous instances out there where a creek/stream must be carried in order to play the hole, possibly 7 times on 6 holes so it seems to me. But certainly Old Town has the other 4 in abundance. Old Town photo tour and write-up to come in short order.
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John,
Nope to Old Town - Laura's tee shot is about 160-ish, so she's acutely aware of forced carries. (She makes up for the short tee shots by aways being within 10 feet of the fairway centerline) I'm looking forward to your thread on Old Town!
PS - I really like forced carries.. Come of the most interesting forced carries I've come across are on the Hurdzan/Fry Hershey Links (PA) from the back tees. This 11-ish handicapper isn't going to score well from back there, but he'll have a lot of fun trying.
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A quick stab at it -
1. Ball in the air fun - angles off the tee, interest in approach shots going over stuff and around stuff.
2. Ball on the ground fun - ground movement in fairways, around and on greens. I love to see the ball roll and take the curvatures of the land.
3. Variety - If a course is taking you on some sort of journey, there should be easier parts that need to be taken advantage of, and harder parts that need to be negotiated without giving up too many strokes. There should be up and down and right and left and some sort of ramdomness to bunker placement.
4. An aesthetic point of view - I'm not tied to one look, aesthetically, regarding green shapes or bunker shapes or fairway mowing lines, etc., but I like it best when it's obvious that the architect had a specific point of view that they carried through the course, rather than creating a hodgepodge.
5. Brain and body testing - A course needs to make you think, and also needs to require proper execution. The punishment for failure doesn't need to be mulitple strokes or lost balls, but over the course of your round you have to make proper choices and then make the shots, or watch your playing partners walk away with your folding money.
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1. Variety
2. Variety
3. Variety
Am I beginning to sound like a real estate agent?
4. Challenge for the scratch golfer, while letting the less accomplished get around without some of the things Laura mentioned.
5. No reliance on overbunkering to titilate the bunker fetishists.
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I was driving around town this afternoon and got to talking with my wife Laura about what factors signify good golf architecture. She came up with a darn good list:
1. Green Complexes - strategic interest and lack of boring designs
2. Forced Carries - too many causes Laura to have no fun
3. Tee placement - how they set up angles, and the way the tee is canted to the ideal playing corridor
4. Bunker placement
5. "Doglegs" - how doglegs fit into the routing - left vs right quantity.
I thought that was a pretty good list.
What would your list look like?
At this point in my golfing life, I'd be happy if the courses I play had two or fewer dumb holes. Sadly, for the most part that seems to be asking too much.
K
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1. Variety
2. Angles
3. Variety and angles.
4. Courage.
5. Humor.
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1. A blend with nature to create an extension of the ground to a golf course.
2. Green complexes that promote the easiest practices to grow good turf.
3. A course that allows maintenance to be affordable and areas cut by the easiest and safest methods.
4. Challenging lines and options that rewards good golf shots and sets penalties for errant shots.
5. Long term vistas.
So its a combination of what is good for golf and good for turf in my book, 95% of the golfing world find conditioning important so the architect must always be thinking of creating the best situation for that grass plant. Too many 'golf pro-designers' dont have that in their mind set and position bunkers/ problems in the exit area from the green to next tee, that forces traffic movements into concentrated areas which can cause turf health problems.
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Add freedom to Pat's list and now we are taliking.
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Good answers!
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For most golfers the top five are:
Their score on the first hole
Their score on the 2nd hole
Their score on the 3rd hole
Their score on the 4th hole
Their score on the 5th hole....
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1. Quality of Fish Tacos
2. Varieties of Gazpacho
3. etc...
Sorry, couldn't resist. I'm looking forward to seeing these answers.
Eric, what did you mean by humor? Could you give us an example of humor which worked well, and poorly?
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1. Excellence and variety of green complexes.
2. Variety within par-3's, par-4's and par-5's in terms of direction, doglegs, hazards and/or length.
3. Consistency of look, feel and playability throughout the entire golf course.
4. A layout that offers the opportunity for a strong challenge to a good golfer.
5. A layout that a player can have a reasonable degree of fun while playing to his/her handicap.
This is off the top of my somewhat empty head. There surely are other factors, but I'd venture to say that every course that I've played that I felt had good architectural bones met or exceeded each of these five factors.
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No one sees a good walk as evidence of good architecture?
That and the ability to simply find your ball and play it again are two of my top factors.
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No one sees a good walk as evidence of good architecture?
That and the ability to simply find your ball and play it again are two of my top factors.
George,
Of course, you're right. The "walk in the park" factor of the Golfweek rating is always something that is in the front of my mind when I play somewhere.
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One of my pet peeves is a hole that is forced or shoehorned into the property for the sake of par.....sometimes you can find a goofball 475 yard par 5 that is impossibly convoluted. Sometimes it's a 280 yard par 4 crammed into a setting that may be better par 3 than par 4.
I get the feeling that in these cases, it's not the architects call: instead, the owner would rather see a par 72 or par 70 instead of just swallowing some pride for the sake of total yardage or par.
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1. Perfect, lush, & green conditioning (includes bright, white, manicured bunker sand)
2. Waterfalls
3. Attentive, fawning service
4. Quality of 19th Hole food & drink
5. Hotness of cart girls
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Nice one, George.
Mike D.,
As to humor, the first example in the positive that comes to mind is the D.A. at Pine Valley. The green at #10 Yale is another that brings a smile.
To the negative? See above if they're played poorly.
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1. Perfect, lush, & green conditioning (includes bright, white, manucured bunker sand)
2. Waterfalls
3. Attentive, fawning service
4. Quality of 19th Hole food & drink
5. Hotness of cart girls
I have had to wait, until I was about 50, when I got lucky enough to for a golf course to be built nearby that did not have to resort to such tricks. At some level, you can not blame the general golfing public for not knowing what they do not know.
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1. Perfect, lush, & green conditioning (includes bright, white, manucured bunker sand)
2. Waterfalls
3. Attentive, fawning service
4. Quality of 19th Hole food & drink
5. Hotness of cart girls
Two points on your list:
Waterfalls are a lot rarer than the amount they get discussed here. I bet there are not more than 100 waterfalls on golf coruses in America, about 1 per every 100 posts about them here. Like the exageration of how many tour pros hit it over 300 yards (less than 20% of tee shots this year) the waterfall effect is overstated and shouldn't be mentioned even in a jest post.
Second, if you get attentive fawing service from hot cart girls, its a top 5 factor. Attentive fawing service from the senior citizen who is marshalling for free golf in retirement probably doesn't count. For that matter, quality of 19th hole food and drink can't rank as highly now that most golfers eat out on the course as an excuse to get attentive fawning service from those hot cart girls.
FYI, there are three cart girls at a mid range fee public course I redesigned in DFW that net over $50K a year in tips.
I will give you the white sand and lush green as the top point, though.
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I bet there are not more than 100 waterfalls on golf coruses in America.
I'll take that bet.
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I'll take that bet too! I think I counted something like 10 waterfalls on Experience at Koele alone!
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1...If the course is ranked in the Top 100
2...If it is designed by Coore & Crenshaw
3...If it is minimalistic
4...If a PGA Tour Event is played there
5...If it is private, greens fees must be over $200 per round
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I may be a little of on total waterfalls. But 18 holes times 15,000 courses is 270,000 holes. Even if there are 270, that is 0.001% of holes having a waterfall. 540 is 0.002% and there can't be more than that, can there?
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270 is 2% of golf courses - I don't calculate waterfalls/hole.
With about 150 courses in Houston - there would need to be three with a falls.
I'll take 270 bet too.
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The course features short, logical walks between green and tee. It means a lot.
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Ain't the waterfalls, it's what they represent...
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2a. When standing at your ball and pondering the next shot, the architecture helps the player clearly imagine the type he/she wishes to execute.
2b. The architecture yields a compelling variety of imagined shots.
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I was driving around town this afternoon and got to talking with my wife Laura about what factors signify good golf architecture. She came up with a darn good list:
1. Green Complexes - strategic interest and lack of boring designs
2. Forced Carries - too many causes Laura to have no fun
3. Tee placement - how they set up angles, and the way the tee is canted to the ideal playing corridor
4. Bunker placement
5. "Doglegs" - how doglegs fit into the routing - left vs right quantity.
I thought that was a pretty good list.
What would your list look like?
I am struck by your #2 and #5.
I played Rees Jones' Quintero this weekend and was, frankly, quite disappointed in the course itself. There are a number of reasons for that but these were two of the biggest. The course has scarcely any holes with a dogleg at all and of the 3-4 that don't play dead straight I can only think of one where position off the tee is used strategically in the way I think a good dogleg should function.
The course also featured the flattest greens I've seen anywhere, let alone on a course featuring so many holes with severe changes in elevation.
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- opportunities for the ground game
- width emphasized as much as length
- variety of lengths and green sizes for the par 3's
- plenty of green contour
- not a big fan of o.b. (one should be able to hit a miraculous recovery shot instead of taking a 2 stroke penalty)
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I'll give it a shot. To many golfers I know, five things that affect how much they like a course (the architecture, writ loose), in no particular order:
1. The ability--the realistic option, at the least--to hit driver on every non-par 3.
1a. No forced layups.
2. Conditioning--get the most mediocre course to have smooth, fast greens and golfers will flock to it, even if the "layout" isn't so inspiring. When I ask people what they thought of a golf course, a comment on the condition of the place--the greens especially--comes in the first few sentences almost every time.
3. Water hazards--I think the chance to lose a ball in a pond or stream or lake or ocean goes a long way toward giving a golf course that perceived "championship" feel.
4. (At public/semi-private/resort courses) GPS in the golf cart. I am convinced that this has saved dozens of mediocre golf courses from ruin in the last few years.
5. Chances to make birdies. Genuinely reachable-in-two par 5s and a genuinely drivable par 4 somewhere in the round. No one of any handicap likes a long slog of a course.
I am a sucker for greens with sideboards and backboards, where you can hit a ball up a slope and have it roll back down with a chance to go in the hole or at least get quite close to it.
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The answers I like
Variety - If a course is taking you on some sort of journey, there should be easier parts that need to be taken advantage of, and harder parts that need to be negotiated without giving up too many strokes. There should be up and down and right and left and some sort of ramdomness to bunker placement.
the ability to simply find your ball and play it again
"walk in the park" factor
a sense of discovery
width emphasized as much as length
Bunker placement
variety of green complexes
Ciao
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3. The architecture presents shots in which the best line of attack is significantly away from the objective (hole).
That's a Doak principle.
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These are the factors that I value in good golf architecture:
1. The course's routing and construction provides the feeling that it was incorporated into the land rather than imposed on it and can be walked
2. Golfers are encouraged to find multiple options for getting from the tee to the green (they all don't have to be immediately apparent)
3. Variety in the design of the par-3s, 4s and 5s as to length, direction of doglegs and shot values
4. Green complexes that reward the ground game as often as the aerial approach
5. Composition and placement of hazards so that mis-played shots incur stroke penalties, not lost ball penalties
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Waterfalls
Golf Cart-Friendly
Kelly Green Fairways
Stimpmeter Readings of 13+
Cold Towels at the Turn
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Also...accuracy of yardage markers.
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There are lots of good answers in here, but for me, one is missing.
Great courses have an element of DANGER.
They have shots on 2 or 3 holes that require accuracy, execution and courage. This is an important part of what differentiates the good from the great courses. e.g Would you think so highly of Cypress point without the 16th hole? Or Augusta without the 12th and 13th holes. Or TOC without the Road Hole? I doubt you would.
scott
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JNC...with the 100 degree heat here in Atlanta, those cold towels at the turn are truly a welcome piece of GREAT architecture!!
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But don't we have to distinguish between architecture, construction & maintenance? Yes, a great architect can design a course that is appropriate to the setting (reasonable to construct) and reasonable to maintain.
But a few years after construction, aren't the course conditions mainly due to how it was built and then maintained, whereas the routing and strategy of the holes are more due to architecture?
My six factors:
1) Variety of approaches to a hole
2) Variety of defenses vs. a good score (or par) - (not just) length, hazards, greens, tightness of fairways, length of rough
3) Harmony with the natural terrain
4) Variety of holes on the course
5) Testing every shot
6) Fun for players of both high and low handicap
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But don't we have to distinguish between architecture, construction & maintenance? Yes, a great architect can design a course that is appropriate to the setting (reasonable to construct) and reasonable to maintain.
But a few years after construction, aren't the course conditions mainly due to how it was built and then maintained, whereas the routing and strategy of the holes are more due to architecture?
My six factors:
1) Variety of approaches to a hole
2) Variety of defenses vs. a good score (or par) - (not just) length, hazards, greens, tightness of fairways, length of rough
3) Harmony with the natural terrain
4) Variety of holes on the course
5) Testing every shot
6) Fun for players of both high and low handicap
I think too many architects (mainly the pro-golfer ones) forget about the very basics of designing a golf course, it has to function properly in order to grow great turf. Sadly too many on here dont recogonise it and wont embrace the combination of doing whats best for the turf and the golf. Hardly anyone included it in their 5 factors that signify good golf architecture.
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1) Good walk
2) Interesting shot selections
3) Great walk
4) Vexing shot selections
5) Great flow that, along with interesting shots, makes a great walk.
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Vertical movement in the earth (fairway undulation to create different lies, and variety of uphill, downhill shots)
Horizontal and diagonal sweep of fairways to create angles
Internal contour in the greens
Center line hazards
An interesting routing
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Gas Carts
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I despair with this site!!!!! Things must function...pretty houses sometimes dont work.
If it has centre line bunkers ......its great architecture WTF.
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I came up with my list without reading any others and came up with variety, variety, variety. Some of these may overlap a bit, but this was my instinctual list...
1) green complex variety (angle to fairway, internal contour, slope direction, hazard locations, uphill/downhill approach, etc.)
2) driving angles
3) hazard variety (mounds, ridges, bunkers, hollows, swales, fescue, water, trees, gorse, etc.)
4) routing, specifically for walkability
5) yardage variety (different length par 3's, 4's and 5's)
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1. Great green complexes
2. Skillful use of the land in the routing
3. Variety in the routing (not an up and back layout)
4. A proper amount of shots with high "fear factor" (pucker your cheeks and hit it) but not TOO much
5. A course that really makes you think on every tee
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1. LAND -- the site dictates so much -- few places succeed with pedestrian sites. Land is no less than 60% of equation for me.
2. ROUTING - the course must be able to max out all features of what the site provides and do so in such a way that provides for the best series of holes -- this includes providing for equal measures no matter which way the wind blows.
3. CONDITIONING -- the course must be prepared to allow those design elements to flourish. Does not need to be ANGC in shape but must be able to allow such features to come to life on a steady and repeated basis.
4. GREEN COMPLEXES -- the course needs to include greens of varying shapes and sizes that accentuate position play from sound approaches and deft driving of the ball.
5. SHOT VALUES -- courses that require the most skillful usage of the greatest range of shots -- this includes shot shaping when called upon and the wherewithal to hit high and low shots when called upon.