How LA may've initially effected GCA

« **on:** September 16, 2006, 09:27:38 AM »

Below I've cut and pasted from a website found under a search on Lancelot "Capability" Brown.

I think it just may be perhaps the first example of landscape architecture influencing the designs of golf course architecture to come. The fact that golf course architectural design would not be influenced by Brown revolutionary "Serpentine" landscape architecture style for almost 150 years is also interesting as golf course architecture basically did not exist before about 1850 and Brown's "Serpentine" style, as can be seen below, was apparently first created about 1750. Brown's Serpentine style would also not connect with golf course architecture until golf first began to migrate out of Scotland into English "inland" sites after about 1850. The interesting thing to note is that a number of golf courses would come to be "layed-out" (routed) through some of Lancelot Brown's massive Serpentine landscape designed English "park" (parkland) estates.

But perhaps more interesting (ironic) is that most of those early English "park" (parkland) courses layed out (routed) through Brown's massive Serpentine curvilinear landscape estate designs for perhaps a few decades initially utilized individual golf architectural features such as highly geometric bunkers and such. In other words, the "designing up" phase of golf architecture had not yet matched the basic natural curvilinear lines of Brown's Serpentine English landscape design style through which most of these early "parkland" courses were routed. It of course goes without saying that these Lancelot Brown landscape designs were of such massive size and scale (literally hundreds and hundreds of acres in some cases) that golf courses could be routed right into them using Brown's curvilinear Serpentine features.

So, it seems to me that the first real and direct influence of landscape architecture on golf course architecture was in a basic routing context---eg those early courses were layed-out not just within Brown's overall design but that they also utilized Capability Brown's massive English Serpentine landscape design features (the natural hill and its compoent random or curvilinear tree arrangements as well as curvilinear lakes and streams and lanes he'd designed).

I'm sorry that I don't know how to link this Brown website on here which is entitled "Brown's Serpentine Style". If someone can do that everyone can not help but notice how the drawings of Brown's Serpentine style look remarkably like the drawings of golf holes of the 20th century with their curvilinear lines. Matter of fact Brown's Serpentine curvilinear lines look remarkably like the curvilinear lines of whole routings to come.

From the website;

The Serpentine Style will be forever associated with the name of Lancelot 'Capability' Brown. One could call it Brownian, but there were other practitioners and it seems better to name the style after its most characteristic feature. In writing about Cobham Hall, Repton spoke of 'modern serpentine gardening'. This is good authority for naming the style Serpentine.

The steps by which the Augustan Style evolved into the Serpentine Style constitute a fascinating episode in the history of taste. It has occupied the attention of many historians and is best chronicled by Christopher Hussey in English Gardens and Landscapes 1700-1750. One of the most celebrated steps in the progression was the retention of Wray Wood and Henderskelf Lane at Castle Howard. Hussey comments that the low hill on which they lie is 'historic ground, since it became the turning-point of garden design not only at Castle Howard but in England'. He could have added 'and the world'.

Serpentine Style: Keydate 1750 Key to Garden Styles
In the middle years of the eighteenth century, Lancelot Brown developed a personal style which can be seen as more-abstract version of the Augustan Style. It made less use of garden buildings and more use of serpentine lines in the layout of woods and water. The classic features of this style were a lawn sweeping up to the house, clumps, a serpentine lake and an encircling tree belt and carriage drive, also showing a serpentine geometry. This is the style of what is often known as the 'English landscape garden'. One could call it the 'Brownian' style. There are many examples.

« **Reply #1 on:** September 16, 2006, 10:27:18 AM »

"Dorothy Stroud attributes 211 designs for English parks to Brown and a surprising number remain in good condition , often because they have adapted well to modern use as public parks, farms, golf courses and schools. The best of them are magnificent, probably more so today than when seen by Brown's critics in the 1790s. My own favourites are the arcadian glade at Prior Park, the Grecian valley at Stowe, the lakes at Luton Hoo and Blenheim Park, the embankment outside Alnwick Castle, the riverside scenery at Chatsworth and the grand views at Petworth and Harewood which J M W Turner painted.

Some of Brown's other designs are so 'natural' and 'English' that it is difficult to appreciate them without a survey of the site as it was and a plan of the works executed by Brown. His lakes lie in comfortable depressions, his woods clothe hills which would resist the plough and his green pastures roll to the rhythm of the English countryside. A large collection of Brown's professional papers, which might have provided more information on what he actually did, was given to Repton by Brown's son and have since disappeared. The paucity of documentation on so many sites makes Bowood a park of special interest."

« **Reply #2 on:** September 16, 2006, 11:58:20 AM »

Tom,

Could you give us the address for this website?

Thanks.

« **Reply #3 on:** September 16, 2006, 12:09:54 PM »

Phil:

Google "lancelot brown" and the website is the third one on the first page that's entitiled something like "Lancelot Brown's Serpentine Garden style".

But it's the third one from the top and it's indented. I'd appreciate it if you could link it on here.

Thanks,

PS:

Brown didn't exactly invent this Serpentine Style in landscape architecture but the point is he was so popular and productive that it basically became his landscape architecture style. That Serpentine style became completely identified with Capability Brown. And not just that but that particular style set the style for what became known as the "English Landscape" style of landscape architecture.

There is also a drawing on that website of one of his Serpentine designs. It sure does look like a really cool curvilinear "wide" multi-optional golf hole to me.

« **Reply #4 on:** September 16, 2006, 01:46:37 PM »

Here is the link you are talking about:
http://www.gardenvisit.com/t/c3s3.html

I stumbled across this after the pictures on the website failed to load: http://www.bowood-golf.co.uk/championship_course.html

This is a golf course that was actually routed through one of Brown's massive parks.

« **Reply #5 on:** September 17, 2006, 07:07:49 AM »

Since it seems fairly undeniable that even some of the early courses in inland England whose man-made architectural features for golf itself (bunkering, greens, tees etc) that could be categorized as "Victorian" features were placed within massive landscaped designed "parks" of what was considered to be a more "natural" application of English landscape architecture (compared to what came before it in the 17th and early 18th century), I think the question eventually becomes what over-all influence has the so-called "parkland" style of golf course architecture had on golf course architecture generally?

It occurs to me that many of the golf courses in inland America that were originally built on farmland and such, have, over the years, knowingly or unknowingly, transformed the look and style of their courses into something that could probably now be categorized as "parkland"----a style that clearly derived from the first courses that were placed on English estates that possessed massive landscape designs of the "Serpentine" style of a Capability Brown.

« **Reply #6 on:** September 20, 2006, 08:24:03 AM »

Go ahead Tom MacWood, offer some opinion on the massive curvilinear landscape designs of Capability Brown (his "Serpentine" style) and the formations of golf architecture to come. I probably wouldn't have even mentioned it if not for the fact that a good number of early inland English golf courses were "layed out" right through the massive landscape architecture that Brown had done up to a century before. It would be pretty hard to imagine how those courses could've been routed through his landscape designs without in some way utilizing Brown's formations and his style. To me the most obvious original connection would be in a routing sense.

Later the curvilinear design drawings of golf holes looked remarkably similar to the massive curvilinear drawings of Brown's landscape design "Serpentine" style.

Do you think all that direct connection was merely a coincidence? To me this is a direct connection between landscape architecture and golf course architecture. To date you have yet to identify anything in a specific physical sense that connects golf course architecture to the Arts and Crafts movement.

You might mention naturalism, but you're forgetting that the natural model for golf already existed in the linksland for centuries and that model had to do with golf exclusively and not wallpaper, furniture, building architecture, cottage gardens or some pervasive "philosophy' that attempted to in some way connect all "art forms".

« **Reply #7 on:** September 20, 2006, 10:22:08 AM »

TEPaul wrote:

"Do you think all that direct connection was merely a coincidence? To me this is a direct connection between landscape architecture and golf course architecture. To date you have yet to identify anything in a specific physical sense that connects golf course architecture to the Arts and Crafts movement."

Being new to the site, I only have a vague understanding of the intellectual battle that you and Tom MacWood have going to establish early influences on the profession of golf course design, but is it possible that the influences that both of you are looking for are not "speficic[ally] physical," which is to say, not tangible? They may even be so subtle as to not be documented at all, in the traditional sense. Ideas themselves are intangible, and fleeting, and it is entirely possible that one or more of the lessons gleaned from the A&C Movement and/or early Landscape Architecture simply, and perhaps unknowingly, found it's way into the brain, and therefore, onto the golf course of a young golf course designer. Yes? No? Couldn't the concept of serpentine golf course design just have seemed like a good idea, and the fact that it happened after a visit to a Brown landscape just be coincidence? Post hoc ergo propter hoc.

This is hardly a legitimate answer to the issue, I know, but an indirect, spontaneous and unintentional influence is just as possible as one that is direct and planned.

« **Reply #8 on:** September 20, 2006, 01:05:28 PM »

I've played Bowood. It's quite an acceptable modern layout in that it doesn't do any damage to the landscape. It's uneven in that some of the course is quite straightforward and there are one or two utterly impossible, ferocious holes. Two of them run around Queenwood, a lovely small country house that you can rent for the weekend (or longer) complete with servants. Prince Charles apparently used to take Camilla there to get away from the public gaze.

« **Reply #9 on:** September 20, 2006, 01:35:51 PM »

"....but is it possible that the influences that both of you are looking for are not "speficic[ally] physical," which is to say, not tangible? They may even be so subtle as to not be documented at all, in the traditional sense. Ideas themselves are intangible, and fleeting, and it is entirely possible that one or more of the lessons gleaned from the A&C Movement and/or early Landscape Architecture simply, and perhaps unknowingly, found it's way into the brain, and therefore, onto the golf course of a young golf course designer. Yes? No? Couldn't the concept of serpentine golf course design just have seemed like a good idea, and the fact that it happened after a visit to a Brown landscape just be coincidence? "

Steve:

That Capability Brown landscaped massive "park" estates came to be used for golf courses is obviously a happenstance, perhaps a coincidence, particularly seeing as Brown had been dead for about 75 years before man-made golf architecture even began and about 70 years before golf began to really migrate out of Scotland into inland England.

But let me tell you something---the landforms that were and still are TOC preceded man-made golf architecture also and by hundreds if not thousands of years, and it was also a happenstance or perhaps a coincidence that golf was played on that site or the linksland. Does that mean many of those natural landforms of TOC are any less a powerful influence on golf architecture to come?

Some even call TOC the prototype for ALL golf course architecture.

There seems little question to me that the massive landscaped "park" estates of Brown's in England was the prototype for the "parkland" style golf course to come. The fact that a number of early courses were layed out right on and through those Brown landscape architecture designs seems to prove that heritage.

« **Reply #10 on:** September 20, 2006, 02:15:43 PM »

Tom

http://www.knoleparkgolfclub.co.uk/index.htm

Here's a famous old parkland turned into a golf course. Click on the visitors section for a slide show.

I think you'd also be interested in

http://www.rochesterandcobhamgc.co.uk/

if only for its extraordinary historic connections.

« **Reply #11 on:** September 20, 2006, 03:07:49 PM »

"Does that mean many of those natural landforms of TOC are any less a powerful influence on golf architecture to come?"

Obviously not, but what I am suggesting (and let me assure you that I hesitate to say this since I too am partial to concise causal evidence) is that chance, even serendipity, probably played a role in the early development of golf over these existing landscapes, e.g. a Brown landscape or any seaside links.

« **Reply #12 on:** September 20, 2006, 03:26:05 PM »

Steve:

I have no doubt that chance played a key roll in most all of golf and golf architecture's evolution.

Chance probably took MacKenzie to the Boer War from which his observations of Boer military trench camouflage led him to apply the same basic principle to hiding the connections and juxtapositon between where natural features ended and man-made architecture began. This camouflage principle of MacKenzie's revolutionized "natural" appearing man-made architecture, in my opinion.

« **Reply #13 on:** September 20, 2006, 04:31:53 PM »

What about early American influences: Olmstead, as opposed to Brown?

Macdonald was, after all, a Chicago socialite of sorts. Surely he was familiar with Olmstead's work at the 1894 Columbian Exposition. Did any of this translate into early American golf course design. Macdonald did not seem to borrow from Olmstead's directly (but rather from his experiences studying the Scottish links), but did he learn and use any design principles that Olmstead had only in the past few decades made popular, or at least visible? What about other early golf course designers?

I'm not in a position to back this speculation up with fact, but it seems logical that intelligent people (such as Macdonald) would have been up-to-date on other American design professionals, and therefore, some of their ideals.

« **Reply #14 on:** September 20, 2006, 06:43:02 PM »

Steve:

It's a good question if anything Olmsted did in landscape architecture actually directly related to golf course architecture either during his lifetime or later in golf architecture.

We did discuss the subject of FLO on here recently. First of all his career effectively ended in 1895 when he basically passed on the company's work to his son and others.

FLO may've been the most notable American landscape architect ever. His career touched on a number of landscape design aspects but he may've been best know for his work on city parks---Central Park in NYC perhaps the most notable. One of his best known ideas in landscape architecture was to make landscape designs in cities for what he termed "sanitize" purposes.

I'm not aware, though, that he was particularly connected to a specific "style" as Lancelot Brown was to the so-called "Serpentine" landscape style in "park" or parkland settings of the 18th century which essentially was the use of curvilinear lines and formations to lend those sites a more natural overall appearance.

FLO often mentioned the "pastoral" scene which in many ways he created.

His son, Frederick Law Olmsted Jr and the Olmsted Co was later involved in some golf course/residential developments, perhaps the best known being Mountain Lake Florida in 1915 with Raynor and a Baltimore developer named Frederick Ruth and golf architect Seth Raynor. In 1924-5 the three combined again to do Fishers Island that virtually used the same staff in the summer that worked at Moutain Lake in the winter.

Ironically, that project that was never build at Ardrossan Farm in Villanova Pa on which I first met Bill Coore was on the site of about a 1000 acre Olmsted architecturally landscaped farm that looks almost identical in its overall plan to a Capability Brown "Park" estate in the 18th century.

When I finally got Bill Coore to describe it so that I could inform my club his description was simply that the site for a golf course was "instant maturity".

« **Reply #15 on:** September 20, 2006, 06:50:55 PM »

TE
What are some of the first courses influenced by Brown?

Did you read my report on Hutchison, Campbell & Hotchkin in Golf Architecture? It goes a little into LArch influence on golf architecture.

« **Reply #16 on:** September 20, 2006, 07:02:25 PM »

"TE
What are some of the first courses influenced by Brown?"

I really don't know which some of the first courses were that were first layed out through Brown Serpentine style landscaped "park" estates in England. I've only heard that they were. From that I'm assuming that a number of them probably were in late 19th century inland England and that the golf course style known as "parkland" originally came from that application. Today there are courses all over America and probably other countries that can realistically be described as "parkland".

"Did you read my report on Hutchison, Campbell & Hotchkin in Golf Architecture? It goes a little into LArch influence on golf architecture."

Tom MacWood;

I did not. I'd be surprised if you mentioned Lancelot Brown and his 18th century Serpentine style of massive English "park" landscape architecture, particularly since you did say on here that most of the A/C proponents who followed Capability Brown about a century later hated Brown's style.

It would really be supreme irony if you somehow tried to tell me now that you've previously ever thought of how Capability Brown's landscape design style may've come to influence golf course architecture in the future in any way.

« **Reply #17 on:** September 20, 2006, 08:36:04 PM »

TE
Would it be that big of a surprise? I've noted Victorian, African, Japanese, LArch, artistic, camouflage, and regional influences in the past. And I've consistantly said on the other thread that your Brown theory is interesting and that the English Landscape movement was an influence on park design and therefore indirectly influenced parkland designs.

« **Reply #18 on:** September 20, 2006, 08:46:01 PM »

I don't know that I have seen any direct attribution of ideas in golf architecture to the work of Frederick Law Olmsted, but the firm he established certainly had a lot to do with it ... as the premier landscape architecture firm of the 1920's, they were the land planners for projects such as Augusta National and Yeamans Hall and Fishers Island. The Olmsted planner for Augusta prepared some interesting reports on Dr. MacKenzie for the home office -- they thought he was someone who would listen to their perspective, instead of just a golf guy who didn't want to take anything else into consideration while planning his layout.

« **Reply #19 on:** September 20, 2006, 08:48:10 PM »

You seem reluctant to admit Olmsted's possible relationship to golf course design. But, once again, we're separating direct influences from those that are indirect.

What about the deliberate creation of viewsheds at Central Park, or the conscious inclusion of natural, winding roads (which is to say the aversion to right angles) at the Riverside community outside of Chicago? What about the large-scale construction of an open space amenity on a unfit site, that, once completed, and certainly upon a contemporary visit, seems to have always been there (again, Central Park). Are not all three of these real issues that are dealt with by the the modern golf course designer?

« **Reply #20 on:** September 20, 2006, 10:29:37 PM »

Quote from: TEPaul on September 20, 2006, 07:02:25 PM

I really don't know which some of the first courses were that were first layed out through Brown Serpentine style landscaped "park" estates in England. I've only heard that they were. From that I'm assuming that a number of them probably were in late 19th century inland England and that the golf course style known as "parkland" originally came from that application. Today there are courses all over America and probably other countries that can realistically be described as "parkland".

It might be a good idea to research early British design in hopes of identifying those courses...that way you'll learn if your notion should be upgraded to theory. It takes a little bit of effort but I think it will be worth it.

« **Reply #21 on:** September 20, 2006, 10:40:02 PM »

"And I've consistantly said on the other thread that your Brown theory is interesting and that the English Landscape movement was an influence on park design and therefore indirectly influenced parkland designs."

Tom MacWood:

That's nice to know. I guess then that means you understand my facts and points about how Brown's LA designs were eventually used for golf and architecture, when and how and why. What you also said earlier on this thread before admitting that was that most all the A/C proponents who followed Brown by about a century hated Brown's LA design style. Do you recall saying that?

I wonder what point that remark was trying to make.

« **Reply #22 on:** September 20, 2006, 10:48:07 PM »

"It might be a good idea to research early British design in hopes of identifying those courses...that way you'll learn if your notion should be upgraded to theory. It takes a little bit of effort but I think it will be worth it."

No problem at all. How long did it take for you to develop your A/C essay, about a week?

I've made the point about Brown and the connection of his LA design style to golf course architecture directly. Facts and history will prove me either right or wrong but it seems to me those Capability Brown "park" estates are out there with a number of golf courses on them and going back to the Victorian Era.

I have yet to see you make any kind of connection directly to golf course architecture and the A/C movement like that. You've talked about A/C building architecture, A/C garden architecture, A/C arts and crafts such as wallpaper, furniture et al and some ethereal A/C "philosophy" that permeated all art forms somehow and the entire city of London and the country-side around it

but I have yet to see you make any direct connection between golf course architecture and the A/C movement.

« **Reply #23 on:** September 20, 2006, 10:56:55 PM »

"Are not all three of these real issues that are dealt with by the the modern golf course designer?"

Steve Burrows:

I've often wondered if there wasn't some direct connections between Olmsted's ideas on LA and GCA but it seems those kinds of LA design connections had been previously picked up by GCA from English LA design. I'm speaking of course of inland English "parkland" golf architecture that somewhat preceded "parkland" American golf architecture.

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