"When did bunkers start migrating out to the periphery of fairways, and cease being a central hazard? I would the cultivation of a "fairway" probably had something to do with it.


It had to happen well, well, well after the cultivaiton of the "fairway" otherwise how could architecture have had it's era of the prevalence of so-called "penal" architecture with cross bunkers and such stretching clear across fairways? Even the great PVGC has a prevalence of that old "cross" feature bunker hazard! It seems to me bunkers on the peripheries of fairways was a reaction to the penal era of architecture. But have you ever noticed how the best architects never went all the way to the peripheries of fairways? The best of them always had bunkers "eating" well into their fairways, even at the height of the so-called "strategic" era.

SPDB,

I wonder how much influence center, single line irrigation systems had on the migration.

Can anyone cite instances where a club filled in all of their centerline bunkers ?

Sean,
Maybe the best architectural question on GCA of all-time.

Personally, I think much of it started when golfer's felt the need to extroll themselves to fair-play--the dumbing down of great golf architecture.

It has reached an pinnacle with set-ups like Oak Hill for their last PGA. Where the bunkers were actually safe havens instead of being in 6 inch or thicker rough.

I'm sure Donald Ross would have regurgitated if he saw it all.

Perhaps he would have for OH, but how about other Ross works

If you look at PH #2, there's a bit of migration going on there. Now that may be attributable to a variety of reasons, not the least of which is PH's reputation as the best second shot course in the world, meaning the greens were the focus.

What's the early evidence, what do the architect's writings say regarding placement? Certainly I think maintenance practices had a huge impact with the advent of a more closely mown fairway. Also, as you alluded to, RTJ had a big impact on bunker migratory patterns. Was he the largest catalyst?

I'm a little confused what it is you're asking here. Is it why bunkers on existing courses from say the teens and 20s now have those bunkers in the rough or are you asking when  design philosophy changed to start building courses that use bunkering only along the flanks of designed fairway corridors? It seems to me we've discussed both subjects a lot of times on here. I'm not sure I want to go find them in the back pages though.

I'm not sure what you mean by central hazards either. If you mean bunkers and such that are inside fairway lines and surrounded on all sides by fairway, I'm afraid we should all recognize that architecture like that even in the best of the "Golden Age" or before or after it seemed to be the rare exception rather than the rule. It's rare to find bunkering like NGLA's bottle hole that's flanked on both sides by fairway and it's rarer still in most any architectural era to find bunkering that's surrounded on all sides by fairway. Examples exist but they've never been common in architecture. I wish they were but they aren't. A well place bunker in the middle of a fairway, for instance, and surrounded on all sides by fairway is, theoretically at least, the most strategic and multi-optional of all because there are up to four ways to handle it---and it's impossible to have more choices than four----unless you're some kind of Left Coast weirdo like TommyN who actually made some elaborate strategic plan from the tee to y hit his tee shot into PV's DA bunker. IF that DA had been in the middle of a fairway and TommyN actually planned to play into it I guess one could say that was technically five available options but no one in their right mind actually plays into a fairway bunker off the tee on purpose!