Homage: Imaginative or Derivative?

[Mark Bourgeois]

Laugh it up, Mr Cheezsteak. It's got a French name so it's Capital-L Legit! I am going to stick that post over on the naturalism thread as my monthly contribution...

RNK. I think their marketing materials describe it in a way we could call it homage to Irish links, owing to the elevation changes.

Good one.

Is Royal Links homage or replica holes? Sorry I can't access the link right now...

[Peter Pallotta]

Mark -

I've been reading that post of yours over and over again (while envying Mr. Cheezsteak's sanity, and craving a couple a cheese steaks and a few Rolling Rocks, big time).

I have everything to learn about this subject, and nothing to offer. But what the hell, here's a few random thoughts:

- maybe this appreciation of negative space is a cyclical affair, because I'm not sure I see it or sense it around me today

-  a revalued negative space in relation to positive space would indeed have to be unconscious, as I don't think we can meaningfully WILL such re-evaluations

- once the spirit has left the sacred spaces, does it ever return? or does it instead find more fertile and unbroken ground, and often in the most unlikely of places? (ignore that one; I'm not sure I know what I'm asking)

- maybe it was a simpler matter for the early shapers of TOC, simpler in that what we call negative space was probably more deeply felt by them to be god's creation, and thus the epitome of fullness and positive space; should it surprise us then that TOC's designers believed the treatment of negative space a more important and serious matter than their relatively paltry human constructs?

- do you remember a thread you had quite a while back where I praised one of the photos/golf holes because "the trees framed a VISTA and not a golf hole"?  Can you imagine if the 'negative spaces' thus framed were truly valued as much as the positive ones, what a mind blowing openess that might engender (while having the field of play concepts remain at least intact and at best totally revitalized)?   

I'm still not sure I understood you, Mark - but maybe a couple of these thoughts will stick in your craw nonetheless 

Peter

[Mark Bourgeois]

Peter

It's not a different perception, it's a different conception. It's not that you literally would "see" differently, it's that you would design differently.

I'm just saying maybe one of the reasons obscurantism took hold is because in the arts and design fields a revaluation of negative space occurred.

I think there are two issues at work here:
First, the softening of contours and angles "inside the ropes."
Second, the tying in of inside the ropes (aka as Philippe's def has it "positive space") to outside the ropes (negative space), in order to hide the hand of man, or perhaps simply to harmonize the outside (negative space) to the inside (positive space).

To blend a golf course into its surroundings, don't you have to revalue the negative relative to the positive? Don't you have to look at what will never be part of the course, and somehow incorporate that into what you create?

For example, you'd route a course to take advantage of a view over a sound, even though the sound had no function inside the ropes.

Or: you'd design bunkers in some style that reflected or mirrored the terrain. While that terrain might technically include the ground inside the ropes, as the entirety of that ground is either actively manufactured or passively manufactured - "manufactured" in the sense that what's left untouched is left untouched only as a product of a conscious design process - fascinatingly, this latter passive approach occurring ONLY if a designer elevates the value of that which is NOT part of the golf course: he gives negative space a "positive" or "affirmative" value. It's like a void that's invested with meaning.

I'm saying people used to not conceive of voids in this way. It was all about the positive space. Negative space was treated negatively.

Apparently, in the art and architecture a major impetus for this change was the Japonisme that infatuated the West in the latter half of the 1800s, providing some influence on movements such as Aesthetic, Arts and Crafts, Impressionism - and various modernist designers and artists, notably Frank Lloyd Wright.

Mark

[Mark Bourgeois]

This passage I recently read from Walter Behrendt I found arresting:

"the domestic buildings of Wright are like Japanese houses, so fitted into the landscape that the building almost imperceptibly blends with surrounding nature.  The Japanese house manifests the same spirit of nature, the same tendency toward an organic structure....The philosophy of a country where man merges in nature..."

He could have been describing the obscurantist school of golf design instead of Wright...

And please everyone don't go crazy on me, I'm not saying the revaluation of negative space was THE reason obscurantism took hold, its just one of the influences. It may not even have been a direct influence, rather one of those things playing out in society, as such forming a soundtrack or background music to the careers of GCAs...

Mark

[Peter Pallotta]

Mark -

thank you. That is clearer to me, but also makes clearer what I'm wondering about in terms of golf course architecture.

Yes, the most appealing of the work connects what's inside the ropes with what's outisde the ropes, connects the postive and the negative spaces (that which will never be 'part of the course'). 

But I'm wondering whether the parameter usually being set today (or perhaps better, the conceptual framework) for what's considered postive and negative space is not quite 'narrow', and more narrow at some fundamental level than what existed around the early days of TOC.

Yes, perhaps in a conscious -- and self-conscious -- way, modern gca exhibits the "philosophy of a country where man merges in nature...".  But it sometimes seem to me that those old, modest and lesser-known parkland courses in the UK exhibit that philosophy much more fully, if less overtly/consciously -- i.e.  the inside-outside dichotomy seems so altogether blurred there that it's as if the designers had no awareness of it at all....and for the better, not the worse

Peter

[JMorgan]

Is Royal Links homage or replica holes? Sorry I can't access the link right now...

Mark, I'd add it to a third category: mimetic or imitative.  It doesn't pretend to be anything but a copy of the original.   It's not referential, nor does it pay its respect by subtle implication or adjustment of proportion or scale, etc.