Landscape architecture and golf architecture?

[Norbert P]

Adam, nice post. Many wise points you've made to justify and place golf course architecture into a true art form.  I agree with the GCA potentials and fortunately I've seen some examples of real genius to keep me and my blind faiths going.

[TEPaul]

Adam F Collins:

That's easy for you to say. Obviously you don't know what it's like to be a creative and imaginative genius like Tom Fazio when he's standing there looking out at a natural landscape that's something less than completely obvious for golf with an army of deep panting D-8s fueled up and ready to roll right behind him!  

And furthermore really great modern architects are like great music conductors. What's the point of all the arm waving if you're just going to leave things as they are? That's no fun. Jeesus man, if you don't massively move the whole damn landscape around someone might think you don't deserve a multi million dollar fee!

[Adam_F_Collins]

See, I'd compare that approach more to an artist -

like...

...um

Who's that guy who wrapped the islands in pink plastic?
 

[Adam_F_Collins]

Seriously, though. I really think that the two approaches to Golf Course Architecture are almost separate pursuits all together.

One is like grand-scale sculpture and the other is like...

...like...

A process of Renovation -

"Same land, but now we can play golf on it!"

[Forrest Richardson]

Golf design — golf course architecture — is really unique among "art" forms. I'm never convinced it is pure art. Rather, art and science.

The closest profession I can ever think of is the creator of games at Milton Bradley. Here a person sits and continually deals with intrigue, mystery and fun. Her or she comes to work and uses technology, science and wit to create a game board and a set of choices and luck which forms a game. Sort of like GCA.

- - -

Landscape Architecture is:

Primarily a fine art, and as such, its most important function is to create and maintain beauty in the surroundings of human habitations, and in the broader natural scenery of the country; but it is also concerned with promoting the comfort, convenience and health of urban populations which urgently need to have their hurrying workday lives refreshed and calmed by the beautiful and reposeful sights and sounds which Nature, aided by the Landscape Art, can abundantly provide  (Origin: Penn State’s Dr. John R. Braken, as recalled by Arthur Jack  Snyder, a student of Braken.)

[TEPaul]

Forrest:

That's very fine description for all of us to contemplate on this discussion. Interesting analogy about the mystery game creating and creator. I guess most golf courses these days go through some form of landscape architecture application during creation but I had an odd project that never happened but had it, it would've been unusual in that the massive landscape architecture application would've happened in reverse order.

Fredrick Law Olmstead & Co did an incredible and massive landscape architecture application on this entire estate maybe 100 years ago and we were going to build a golf course on it. I kept pressing Bill Coore to give me some description of the site and the potential of the place for a golf course so I could go and report it to my club. He didn't give me much of a description for some time but then after a few days he said the best way to describe the place and the site for golf would be "instant maturity". Pretty interesting label really. But then even more interestingly he said although the place was otherworldy beautiful and truly mature that actually put a whole host of limitations on him to build a course on it. The mansion alone was really hard to figure out how to get around and not too close to with golf holes.

[BCrosby]

Adam wonders:

"As this thread moves more toward the discussion of GCA as an art form, I find myself trying to find a good comparison between Golf Course Architecture and another form of art - and I find it difficult."

Music is the art form closest to gca. Both are performance arts. The beauty of the musical score means little if the music, as played, is not good.

Ditto for golf courses. They are like a musical score. If the quality of golf they evoke is not good, it is not a good course. However well landscaped, however beautiful the views, however well done the clubhouse. If the course is not conducive to great golf, it is not a great golf course.

For that reason I think links between landsacpe architecture and golf architecture are wildly over done.

TOC is, arguably, both the greatest course in the world and the ugliest.

Bob

[TEPaul]

"TOC is, arguably, both the greatest course in the world and the ugliest."

Bob:

I sure wouldn't say TOC is the ugliest course in the world. Maybe it is if someone is into something in Las Vegas or something like that. But we know TOC preceded the business of golf course architecture and it probably preceded the business of landscape architecture too!

TOC is touted by almost everyone as the prototype of all golf and golf architecture, the mecca of golf and architecture, the one example that preceded it all. So many interested in the profession of golf architecture seem to have studied it somehow. So the thing that astounds me, and I think even all the architects in history who studied it, respected it and were in architectural awe of it, is why it was never copied more comprehensively!

You know what I think Bob? You know why I believe it was never used as the real prototype from which all golf architecture emanated? It wasn't the art principles or formulaics of landscape architecture, or the game mind of man, or anything else we've thought of yet---it was the damn lawyers of the world, and nobody can deny they preceded TOC!

That's who did in golf course architecture and probably right from the start!    

[Norbert P]

  Perhaps what makes The Old Course so incomprehensible, even to the most learned and experienced of players and course designers is the shifting baselines of society's vocabulary.  *
  We've gone, in just a few generations, from primarily an agrarian society to an informational society.  Whereas, once we could understand the language of The Old Course and its features, or wholeness, now we have been accustomed to the obviousness of 18 holes at XXXX yards with pinching fairway bunkers at XXX yards out.
  If designers are mainly inspired by designing golf holes, they may feel the need to add nature to make nature more understandable to a morphing group of golfers who are losing the parlance and submersion of nature.   Artists!  Fight the obvious.   Read some Wodehouse, once in a while. Read some John Muir. Read H.V. Morton.  
   Artists, test the cold waters by diving into the sky.

 ( *  IMNSHO, if we keep defining and ranking the BEST, we're diminishing the many values of the rest. )

[Tom_Doak]

Norbert:

* But the rankings of the best courses always include a bunch of courses which do not conform to the "obvious" guidelines we have adopted, with The Old Course high among the counter-examples.

Then again, a place like Painswick is an excellent example of golf architecture which has no chance of being ranked above championship venues without any soul.

It's the redesigns and updates which are wearing me out, slowly but surely undermining the nature of the great courses.

Years ago when I first visited Indianwood, the owner told me that his new course would be even better than the old one, and I told him good luck.  When I went back to see how they'd done, I found they had been adding bunkers and making changes to the older course.  I told the owner that sabotage was not part of our bet!

[TEPaul]

Norbert:

What are you doing? Are you wigging out or have you been reading Max Behr again?

But you're right, instead of the randomness of TOC there's all this fixation with the way things have to be in golf and architecture (bunkers just the right XXXX yardage and such) is just more of that damn "game mind of Man" that Behr was so concerned about where everything has to be perfectly defined, positioned, formulaic, etc!

[MikeJones]

Perhaps one of the most important skills of any course architect is recognising the parts of the site should be kept as much as possible as they were naturally and which parts needs a little helping hand. Of course the trick would then be to ape nature so that it would be almost impossible to see afterwards which part of the land was altered significantly.

Can that process be learned by study and practice (LA) or is it a skill that some people just "have"?

[TEPaul]

Some architects most certainly do have that skill and some have it in spades. It seems like the on-going question on this website, though, is if all architects have that skill or if some of them just don't care much about that.

[BCrosby]

Tom Paul -

Be careful what you say about lawyers. I have to brush a lawyer's teeth every morning and sleep with another one every night. And neither of us feel responsible for the special status of the TOC in the history of gca.  

My point about TOC is pretty straight forward. If landsacpe design were important to great golf architecture, there wouldn't be so many great courses that are - by the criteria of landscape design - ugly. TOC is but one of many great courses that, as landscape design projects, would get a failing grade.

Bob

[Forrest Richardson]

Mike,

"...the trick would then be to ape nature so that it would be almost impossible to see afterwards which part of the land was altered significantly."

Perhaps often, but wouldn't that preclude many great designs and ideas? The Biarritz green, Raynor banks, and Dye bulkheads to name but a few.

[RJ_Daley]

Gents, a nice discussion.  For those of you who can use the search button better than I can, you might try to find an old thread from one of the first years of GCAtlas, where architect Jeremy Glenn held his own in the LA vs GCA discussion, relating some of the LA stuff and the English tea garden model or ideal concept, and how they evolved into the GCA discipline.  I remeber not being too much in accord with Jeremy's views, but it was a long thread with a lot of good views by many contributors...

[MikeJones]

Yes Forrest I agree it's not the be all and end all. I actually said "ape" nature and not shape nature but it's a small point. Dye for example has shown that he can walk hand in hand with nature if he thinks the property suits it. I'm sure he wouldn't build a bulkhead on a hole if it was totally out of character with the rest of the course.

It's interesting that in LA there seem to be two distinct schools of thought. One favoures order and symmetry wheras the other favours emulating nature. It seems that many successful architects use both ideas as and when the terrain requires it.
An interesting parrallel with art is that even though many of the artists famous for their whacky and obscure works were very capable of superb "fine art" They just chose to do something else. Surrealist Salvador Dali springs to mind. I remember my sister (a professional artist), showing me a picture of one of his wonderful still life drawings some time ago.

[TEPaul]

BobC:

You don't think lawyers were responsible for the corruption of golf course architecture starting over a couple of hundred year ago? Alrighteee then, I just thought I'd run that theory by you. God knows there've been some way out theories on things on here in the last few months so I thought I'd just throw that one up against the wall to see if it's stick for at least five minutes!    

How about the sheep and the rabbits? It seems to me when they left things started to go to hell in a hand-basket fast!

[Forrest Richardson]

Mike — I've edited my post...."ape", not "shape". I thought you had made an error...now I see it was my error. Sorry.

Still, many things in golf design are not about nature at all. I believe there is a time and a place for making one's work looks as if it were always nature...but this is rare. A golf course is conditioned nature, if such a definition exists.

[Tom_Doak]

Mike J:

No one just "has" the skill of making construction look natural.  It takes a lot of practice in the field.

I don't remember being taught much about it in landscape architecture, either, except perhaps as an idea.

[TEPaul]

"No one just "has" the skill of making construction look natural.  It takes a lot of practice in the field."

One good example would be those fellows who basically make bunkering. From what I've seen out there the companies of Doak, Hanse, Coore & Crenshaw, Devries and some others I don't know that well are really advanced in that vein.

You watch and talk to guys like Jeff Bradley, Rodney Hine, Jim Wagner, Jim Nagel, Bill Kittleman et al and in rough construction like Kye Goalby (and those are only the ones I've ever talked to) and you start to get some ideas of what they do and their skill. They aren't really that definitive about it at least not to a layman---it just seems to me to be a feeling---and then a skill to get that feeling into reality. All of them must have very fine senses of observation, though, to know what they're looking for. After that how they actually do it is interesting to see and know.

[Eckstein]

TEPaul
What is your favorite Devries course?

[Bruce Katona]

Tom: I agree with the posts both Jeff and Tom D. posted earlier.  I also studied Landscape Architecture; at Rutgers University in NJ.  The technical aspects of the program: grading, drainage design, construction detailing and management are wonderful tools for anyone in the golf design and construction business.

 One of the first principals taught at Rutgers is that landscape architecture is the modulation of exterior space; where you flow through space as if it is a series of rooms.  In simple terms a par 3 would have a space for a tee design, a transition form tee to green complex and a green complex; which results in three different spaces for that hole.  All three experiences are linked together for that one hole and the experience should have a consistancy (not the same) throughout the course (similar tee markers, benches, other design elements, etc.).

After designing the experience of the spaces, you need to add the correct technical specifications (water runs down hill) regarding grading and drainage.  Then one can have fun with the finishing touches:  shade and shadow patterns bunkers creats, ornimental grasses and plantings and mowing patterns.

Just my two cents of design.

[Steve Lang]

 

Design + Art = Architecture, i.e., building something

Did the lawyers influencing TOC write laws to add the gorse or remove it??

[Carlyle Rood]

At UGA, a few instructors often include a landscape project that requires you to study a particular type of landform, and then design a space that emulates or fits within such a landscape.

I did a comparable project after studying (Southeast U.S.) coastal landforms.  It was an eye-opening experience.  I learned how dunes were formed and how marshes are created and how they regulate themselves.  I even discovered some mathematical formulas to verify whether my designed dunes had authentic form.

There's also a great deal to learn about which plants are appropriate for said landforms when considering light, slope, soil, climate, etc.  Part of ensuring authenticity of landforms is providing the appropriate plant palette to support the landforms you've created.  Making poor selections can compromise the health and durability of your design following some catastrophes (e.g., fire, flood).