Mark, to those that know me it should come as no surprise that I love how Mackenzie did this type of bunker. I 100% agree that it challenges the golfer while not having to reduce the size of the green, and as you said, while at the same time not losing a multitude of pin positions. This of course allows the green to be larger and allow more interest to built into it and challenge the golfer that bails out and chooses to not challenge a tight pin. I wish this was used more often today. And not to mention the fact that IMHO, it looks great.

MarkB:

Those are some fine observtions on your part and well articulated.

Why it's not been seen more is a very worthwhile question. It may seem like a simplistic answer but I have a feeling it may have a lot more to do with the difficulty of maintenance practices, particularly mowing than most of us realize.

Bob Crosby and I spent the day at the USGA yesterday and at one point we saw some really wonderful old photos in the photo archive of courses and some of Cypress Point that showed bunkers like this the way they were originally.

There's no question in my mind that to mow and particularly to turn mowers around those greens and greenside bunkers when they were maintained like that must have been a real headache.

PaulC:

I've got to tell you something. With Ran Morrissett's proposed new upgrade of the GOLFLCLUBATLAS.com website I'm going to recommend that all your posts get collected together into an anthology (eventually they'll need to be hardbound with a gold leaf cover) and put on the menu to the left. They are unbelievable, individually and collectively, alternately funny, poignant, sometimes hysterically funny, but often most thought provoking indeed.

You get weirded out by looking at real MacKenzie bunkers and you get horizontal vertigo from looking at a Fazio hole, do you? OK, I think I understand. If and when I see you tee it up on a Fazio par 3 and for some reason begin to tilt to about a 45 degree angle before hitting the ball then I'll completely understand, particuarly if I'm absolutely certain that flask ain't less than about ha, ha, haalf f, fff, fuull in yo pocketa.

Paul C,

Checked the club history and judging as best I can from photos this maintenance style appears to go back at least as far as 1941.

Nice to hear that if they don't intimidate you visually, at least they do something to you visually.

Does fazio do eat in bunkers? In my experience while he does cape and bay bunkers there is more of an offset.

Tom Paul, nice try but I think Vol 1 from the archives will be "Uncle in the Attic: brilliant musings from
 golf's greatest eccentric".

Mark

Mark.....re Fazio....thats why I said certain Fazio holes from the tee, and only on ones with a plethora of bunkers....because from there you can get a similar effect ....a spatial overlapping that can confuse the eye.

Paul,

Off the top of your head, can you think of other examples of eat-in bunkers?

And is there a way to reduce maintenance costs for this technique?

In addition to providing interesting hole locations and visual intimidation, I think close-in bunkers reflect a Mac belief that the player who hits it too wide should face a harder shot than one who misses it a little. The visual intimidation of having one of these sight-blocking bunkers between the green and you is indeed frightening.

Whaddya think of that? It certainly sounds "fair"!

"One could argue that an interest in golf architecture, devoid of a financial interest, automatically qualifies a person as eccentric."

I'm not going to agree with that but I'm definitely not going to argue with it either particularly since some of the greatest and most enduring golf architecture ever done was done by men who had absolutely no financial interest in what they produced.

Those are facts and I think anyone would have a hard time denying them. But what they produced and that they had no financial interest in it is perhaps just one side of the coin.

The other side of the coin is---were they eccentrics?

That's an interesting question to consider.

There does happen to be a tertiary factor---eg there seems to have been something of an inordinate amount of tragedy connected to those particular men. I'm not sure if that's just coincidental or if there may be something there to seriously consider.

I agree with TomP as per conundrum.

I'll add a few more;

I don't feel that camouflage is at all concerned with visual intimidation....in fact it is quite the opposite. Its really more about creating patterns and forms to aid in concealment. Mackenzies bunkering rarely conceals itself.


Along the same vein, Alister states... "In discussing the need for simplicity of design, the chief object of every golf course architect worth his salt is to imitate the beauties of nature so closely as to make his work indistinguishable from nature itself."  -- Alister Mackenzie, Golf Architecture
Once again, I have a hard time making my eye think that some of his complexes are at all indistinguishable from nature.
Some of his seem to border on Dr Suess like landscapes....something he shares at times with another great designer....Pete Dye.

Mark,
I think placing bunkers so close to greens - to the point that there was almost no fringe -  was common in Mac's time. But perhaps Mac did it best. Wayne Morrison has some early photos of the Cascades that have the same kind of intimidation - although Flynn's bunkers there are not as randomly convoluted or visually complex as the ones you show.  We may have to wait for the book to see them - unless Wayne wants to post them now (I will if it's ok with you, Wayne).

Aerials from the 30s have many examples of architects placing greenside bunkers almost flush against the putting surface. I'll look for some to post.

Maintenance must be the reason that they went out of favor. I can't think of how Royal Melbourne maintains those - except maybe with scissors.

Tom Paul,

I will side more on the side of architecture than landscape on this one.

These stark top lines are beautiful but rather than simply imitate the top line of a dune (excellent observation! I never thought of that), I think the form directly follows from its function.

That function is to present visual intimidation. These beautiful, starkly-defined curvilinear bunker edges don't simply hide the green but make the shot more intimidating in that they present the golfer a clear margin between success and failure, with no apparent "buffer of mediocrity."

There are many who have worked this profession who were of high intelligence but I think things like this point to the possibility MacKenzie was a genuine genius(overused term that unfortunately devalues its power): in his use of bunkers this way he managed to find a way to use bunkers to recreate the visual challenge most of us associate only with water (a clean, bright line demarcating success and failure, with no buffer between), and yet by working in the medium of sand rather than water, managed to present the intimidation of "death" yet offer a reasonable possibility for recovery and "redemption."

In other words, in these sharp-edged, eat-in capes he found a way to adapt the function of water to the form of sand...wow!

Also of interest is how the angle of approach affects the nature of the intimidation.  Obviously, you can avoid it if these eat-in capes AE not on your direct line. But when they are on your line they provide visual intimidation close up as well as far away. They're like "fractals" in that regard.

Secondly, Tom Paul, regarding tragedies there was a famous study of British PMs that found a disproportionate number relative to the general population suffered the death of a parent, usually a father I believe, in childhood.
 
Tom Doak, thanks for the compliment!

Mark

"I'll add a few more;
I don't feel that camouflage is at all concerned with visual intimidation....in fact it is quite the opposite. Its really more about creating patterns and forms to aid in concealment. Mackenzies bunkering rarely conceals itself."

Paul:

You know even though this site seems to have been over Mackenzie's observations on Boer military trench camouflage and how he applied it to golf architecture many times there always seems to be a thing or two missing about how he really did apply it to golf course architecture.

On this subject of course Tom Doak should weigh in as I surely do know he understands all that Mackenzie observed that way in the Boer War and in all the ways he may've applied it to architecture.

Some seem to think Mackenzie actually tried to disguise or conceal his bunkers from the golfer. He did nothing of the kind even though if a golfer turned around and looked back at a Mackenzie hole he'd just played those bunkers that were so visible in the playing of the hole were deceptively gone from visibility.

The only way he applied camouflage techniques to his visible bunkering was in how he "tied them in" to surrounding grades so that it did not look much like they were constructed, not that they weren't visible.

But strategically Mackenzie's architectural style has always been labeled as the ultimate in "looks hard, plays easier".

That theme, in my opinion, is how he really applied the concept of his observations on Boer military trenching to golf course architecture.

Most understand that the Boers constructed military trenches that were so naturally designed and constructed that the British did not even realize they were there.

But obviously the Boers were smart enough to realize that that was certainly not all they should do with military trenching because if the British couldn't figure out where those camouflaged Boer trenches were then they wouldn't know where to fire and they probably wouldn't fire.

And so the Boers also constructed military trenches that were a complete immitation of British military trenches---eg very engineered and man-made looking and visible and obvious.

Those were the Boer dumby trenches and the Boers obviously never manned them. All they were there for was to draw British fire away from where the Boer's really were--in their totally naturally concealed and camouflaged trenches.

I don't know enough about Mackenzie's courses and their conceptual strategic workups to know if Mackenzie purposely tried to draw golfers into taking a risk at his bunkers for a reward when in fact there was no strategic reward there---where the real reward was totally concealed by no visible evidence of any RISK whatsoever. (in a way he did that on CPC 6th hole even though the deception did not involve bunkering).

If he actually did use the latter Boer technique architecturally in golf of drawing enemy fire on highly visible dumby trenches by seducing golfers to risk dealing with a bunker for no reward, then he did in fact use that last deceptive technique of the Boer immitation British trenches that were dumbies.

I do however, know that William Flynn used this deceptive technique of deceiving golfers into taking a risk at bunkering for no strategic reward a lot more than just infrequently. His "reverse" dogleg concept of which he did quite a few is a perfect example of this which would be the application of the Boer dumby trench concept of drawing fire with no beneficial result.

The "maintenance cost" explanation doesn't make complete sense to me: why in an era of escalating maintenance costs would courses decide to spend less?

The irony is that this is an element of maintenance which actually isn't aesthetics but can affect play very significantly.

No, I'm more inclined to believe the tactic fell foul of some misplaced belief in fairness. Thus the creation of buffers of mediocrity between bunker and green: if you missed the green a little you shouldn't face a stark penalty, and if you missed them a lot you shouldn't face a(nother) harsh, exacting shot.

Craig, looking forward to the pics - oh, on complexity, I believe a number of these capes actually were introduced subsequent to the design so as to offer entryways for golfers.

Mark

EDIT: I'd forgotten Tom Doak's comment about sand on greens. That's a very good point; for example, the 7th hole on RM West some years back was found to have risen by *several* feet due to this as well as topdressing, etc.