(This is a breakout from Paul Cowley's "Folly" thread.)
Thinking about the cart path thing. The only time you hear them discussed is in the context of hiding them. They are treated as a scar on the face of a golf course. But, surely, there must be ways to convert them from a design liability to a design opportunity.
Finding ways to integrate cart paths into playing strategies - as is often the case with roads and paths on UK courses - ought to be something American architects jumped on with both feet years ago. Cart paths are a uniquely American design problem. Start to finish paved cart paths are a distinguishing feature of American golf courses. Yet American designers seem only to view them as something to cover up, like bad acne.
Why aren't they integrated into the course, as roads, paths and walls are in the UK? Why don't they have more of a role in playing strategies?
Because they are "unnatural"? There isn't much on a typical US residential development course that isn't unnatural. Like houses, pools, backyard bbq grills, decks and chaise longs.
Car paths aren't going away. I would think architects would believe it important to find more imaginative ways to integrate them into modern courses.
The 10th at Crabapple (ATL, Fazio/Eger) is a hole where a cart path functions - sort of - like the Road on a reverse Road Hole. I'm not sure it works very well, but the cart path does come into play, for all the right reasons. My guess is that it was an intended feature.
The more I've thought about the 10th at Crabapple, the more I both liked it and the more it struck me that it was a gutsy design. Do people know of other similar examples of thinking out of the box about cart paths?
Bob