David I agree on all points, except for mimicing nature. Well, I don't disagree with mimicing nature, but I wouldn't encourage mimicing nature anymore than more obvious man made features. Its all matter of degrees. The most important aspects of any feature is to make it impactful without causing grief in terms of drainage etc and budget maintainable. Depending on the property, I am not bothered if these elements look like Langford & Moreau's or Coore & Crenshaw's work. The "encouragement" runs in cycles. These days, I would rather see more archies take chances with bold, artificial earth works features rather than what we have seen heralded as awesome thse past 25 years.
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Sean that's an interesting point regarding the degree of contrivance and your perspective on the merits. I tend to agree with you. It's hard to say a MacRaynor course is anything but contrived, and nowadays, anything but loved!
Two thoughts: if someone built a faithful MacRaynor course by bulldozing a natural links land I think most of us would see that as a travesty. So, site context matters.
Second, architects like Muirhead and Engh get knocked for their some of their contrived features, though they tend to be playful imo. Should they be getting more of a pass, or should there be more acceptance of the more extreme artificiality we sometimes see as long as the experience of playing those designs delivers?
David
I think guys like Muirhead, Engh and Strantz etc should be given some latitude to be creative. But then I am not paying thier fees or trying to make a living from operating a golf course. Its difficult to know if it is the punters, course owners or archies who mainly drive the course design market..its probably a combination of all three plus other forces...a big one being the state of the economy. On this topic I think Hunter is very pragmatic in supporting the idea of interesting designs which are aesthetically pleasing to most, functional and maintainable. It is very difficult to argue with his points. However, human nature demands innovation and I mean innovation in neutral terms...its not necessarily good or bad. Unfortunately (imo anyway...I was recently called a luddite on this subject
), it seems as though the functional aspect of some design features is not very maintanace budget friendly and artificial turf/plastic is being flown up the flag pole as ways to save money long term. In one recent case of astro turf hell I experienced, the obvious answer was to cut trees down to allow grass to grow, but instead....
Incidentally, innovation is the reason I think all the rollbacking in the world is not going to stop people from wanting to alter courses built more or less on the Hunter etc model(s).
I wonder what Hunter would say about the use of plastic/astro turf and other man-made grass substitutes and I mean that because I am not convinced the ODGs wouldn't have grabbed some of the modern build methods and materials. Most of it certainly doesn't look natural, but in the big picture, we are in early stages of its use on golf courses.
Colin
I agree with you, some of the outlandish design stuff doesn't do much for me, but its still important for what might come from these efforts in the future. One never knows.
Yes, penal architecture without losing a ball...do and don't die.
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