Worthy of Thought

[Kyle Harris]

Tom Doak just mentioned on the Easterm Philosophy thread one of the big things that I've taken away from work with Renaissance Golf Design:

But, one interesting analogy that I draw from your story is the difference between cut and fill in golf course design.  I have done nearly all of my best work by cutting away at things, rather than building them up.  Likewise, "creating" [or building up] a sculpture from clay is a very much different form of art than cutting away at wood or at stone.  I'm with the carpenter!

I believe that such a simplistic difference makes for some huge deviations between styles and presentation and I feel the idea is worthy of a thread of its own.

[Mike_Young]

Kyle,
I just read the other thread and agree with TD's method.  But there can be times when one would use the Coore/Crenshaw method also. 
Before I got into the golf design business I was a cabinet maker having started while still in highschool.  Using cabinet making as an example, there can be plenty of people that attend a school to learn woodworking and they can master all of the technical skills but if they don't have an eye for the wood grains and matching boards in order to bring out the beauty in a piece then you can have a technically sound piece of furniture but there may be no "flow" to it.  And I see golf design that way.  What has happened is that so many golf courses may be technically sound but have no soul and the architects that built them may have zero artistic ability.  That scenario is very common over the last 25 years.  So many technically sound people don't appreciate artistic ability.  So we end up with junk whether it be golf courses, furniture, paintings or even cars.

[JNC Lyon]

That's an interesting thought to chew on, and it was definitely a theme of the Golden Age architects.  I remember reading some of Donald Ross's notes on Oak Hill.  His biggest earthmoving projects were cuts into the land (like lowering the ridge on 7 East, or cutting through the hilltop on 13 West), but there is little or no description of building up.

I think the proof is in the pudding though: cut-down features look rugged and adventuresome, whereas built-up features look contrived and awkward.  Maybe that's just my eye, but I've learned to trust my eye for architecture over the years.

[Mike Nuzzo]

Kyle
If you couldn't tell if it was cut or fill how would that make for a huge style or presentation difference?
Cheers

[Jeff_Mingay]

This is a very interesting topic, Kyle (and Tom).

I'm in the midst of four renovation projects (at different stages... two in construction, two in planning) where we're cutting, cutting and cutting... a lot of modern 'fill' features added to older courses; so many features around a number of greens at these courses, for example, are 'up' when I know they'd be better 'down'. So we're cutting, taking these features away/down.

Apparently, I'm with the carpenter too.

[Patrick_Mucci]

Kyle,

I've noticed, on a number of courses built in the 20's, evidence of building up the fairway footpad through "fill"/ "cut & fill"

Donald Ross and others employed this method and he wasn't known as a constructionist.

To most who play these courses, they would never see the "fill" aspect since the evidence is only visible at the perimeter of the playing corridor, Perhaps the grander scale of the fill, out to the perimeter camouflages the "fill" aspect of the hole to the golfer, especially those whose game is less prone to shots taking them out to the perimeter of the playing corridors.

Mike Nuzzo also raises a good point

[Tom_Doak]

Kyle:

I knew when I made that original post that it would confuse a lot of people, because on 95% of golf projects you are making the cut and fill balance ... if you create your features by cut, you still have to figure out what to do with the fill and how to hide it, or vice versa.

Streamsong was a rare project in that I could give some of the material we cut over to Bill so he could use it for fill ... though it was only maybe 25% of our total earthwork, and an even smaller percentage of his.  Still, you will probably never find a better project to illustrate the difference between the two approaches.  It took me a long time to figure out that was how Bill's approach differed from mine, and we offered to draw the plans for his course just to see what we could learn about his approach to it.

So ...

I find a green site that sits up naturally, so I don't really have to worry about surface drainage issues, and then whittle away from it, although I'm often just playing with tiny amounts of cut and fill and rarely removing any material from the green site.  Bill finds a green site that sits lower, and builds up the green with sand fill to solve whatever drainage issues might result from the low spot.  That's one reason my greens tend to sit up closer to eye level [which I'm trying to cut back on], and it's probably why Bill tends to have a couple of "up and over" holes on each of his routings, too.  Note that the 18th hole on the Blue course at Streamsong is an up and over hole ... but it's actually NOT one that we borrowed from Bill, it's just a hole that I thought of after pondering the difference between our respective styles.

We create all of our bunkers with an excavator, and often lose the material back in the fairway somewhere.  This was a major change in my style -- we started to do this at Pacific Dunes -- before that, we were building the bunkers with a bulldozer, and often raised the back of the bunker with the material from the cavity, which tended to ruin the natural feature we were building into.  Bill also builds his bunkers with an excavator, and he relies on Jeff Bradley to generate enough material for the various features he wants to build out of fill.

That's all the examples I will give, for the time being.  Don't want to spike the discussion.

[BCrosby]

Great thread.

Tom - This discussion reminds me of an old Sebonack thread from a few years back. Someone asked what were the main diffferences between your method and Nicklaus'. Your answer was something to the effect that you designed a hole from the "outside in" and Nickluas designed holes from the "inside out".

That strikes me as consistent (in an odd way) with, what your are saying about the different approaches you and Coore take. Your approach is more substractive. Coore's is more additive. I don't mean to suggest a kinship betwen Coore's approach and Nicklaus'. It's just a different way of slicing the issues. Fascinating.  

Bob

  

[Peter Pallotta]

Very interesting, Tom.  And it points out that the master carpenter Ch'ing was being a bit modest, or at least not providing the full picture. There is a mystery to his art-craft - and that mystery has to do with a kind of internal "seeing".  Even after all his preparation both physical and spiritual, Ch'ing still has to make a choice, i.e. he needs to choose a tree that in his mind's eye he sees containing the musical stand in it already. But what does he see? And how much of his art-craft is actually in that ability to see? In the same way, it seems that you and Bill actually see differently, in that internal sense.  He looks at the land and imagines his routing and his golf holes with an eye to filling in/up, while you look at the land and imagine your routing and golf holes with an eye to cutting away.  In both cases, the land/wood already contains the golf course/musical stand -- but only to those unique sets of eyes.

Peter

[Michael Whitaker]

"I find a green site that sits up naturally, so I don't really have to worry about surface drainage issues, and then whittle away from it, although I'm often just playing with tiny amounts of cut and fill and rarely removing any material from the green site.  Bill finds a green site that sits lower, and builds up the green with sand fill to solve whatever drainage issues might result from the low spot.  That's one reason my greens tend to sit up closer to eye level [which I'm trying to cut back on]"

Tom - Doesn't this result in most holes playing up hill, or at least having uphill approachs? I've often wondered why you make some of your routing choices... playing to the high spots for drainage was my theory. I have not played many Tilllinghast courses, but of what I've seen he tended to do the same.

[Tom_Doak]

Very interesting, Tom.  And it points out that the master carpenter Ch'ing was being a bit modest, or at least not providing the full picture. There is a mystery to his art-craft - and that mystery has to do with a kind of internal "seeing".  Even after all his preparation both physical and spiritual, Ch'ing still has to make a choice, i.e. he needs to choose a tree that in his mind's eye he sees containing the musical stand in it already. But what does he see? And how much of his art-craft is actually in that ability to see? In the same way, it seems that you and Bill actually see differently, in that internal sense.  He looks at the land and imagines his routing and his golf holes with an eye to filling in/up, while you look at the land and imagine your routing and golf holes with an eye to cutting away.  In both cases, the land/wood already contains the golf course/musical stand -- but only to those unique sets of eyes.

Peter

Peter:

The main reason it was so interesting to work with Bill closely at Streamsong, was to find out what things we saw the same and what we didn't.  He had worked on a routing for the center part of the property before they had any maps to work with, so he had a bit of a head start on me, and we never just went to our own corners and tried to do different layouts ... I started with some of the ideas that he'd already had.  When walking with him, his routing choices just look so obvious, but I know for a fact that I would have seen some of his holes [the 3rd or 15th on the Blue course] and not others [the fourth on the Blue or the 16th on the Red].  Note that I was able to use some of Bill's holes in our routing, as it turned out when we split things up, whereas he didn't use very much of mine.

The more interesting part was to see what the other one came up with in SHAPING holes, that we both had tried to visualize while routing them.  I looked long and hard at some of his holes, trying to imagine what I would do with them -- because those might have been on my course -- and yet I never imagined the things he came up with on his 7th, 8th and 9th, or the aforementioned 16th.  I haven't grilled Bill on his thoughts on our course, but the two holes I know he was surprised by are the short 5th [which was one of his green sites, though I'm playing to it from a bit different angle] and the short par-4 13th [a little stretch of land Bill had avoided in his routings, because he didn't see anything good to do with it].  He and Ben both say that 13th hole is their favorite hole on the Blue course, but I think that's partly because they know what we started with.

My point is that sometimes we would see the same holes on the ground, and sometimes not, but even when we saw the same holes we often had different ideas on what to do with them.  But, that's more likely to happen on a site like Streamsong, which was so rich with opportunities for interesting golf.

[Tom_Doak]

"I find a green site that sits up naturally, so I don't really have to worry about surface drainage issues, and then whittle away from it, although I'm often just playing with tiny amounts of cut and fill and rarely removing any material from the green site.  Bill finds a green site that sits lower, and builds up the green with sand fill to solve whatever drainage issues might result from the low spot.  That's one reason my greens tend to sit up closer to eye level [which I'm trying to cut back on]"

Tom - Doesn't this result in most holes playing up hill, or at least having uphill approachs? I've often wondered why you make some of your routing choices... playing to the high spots for drainage was my theory. I have not played many Tilllinghast courses, but of what I've seen he tended to do the same.

Michael:

It doesn't necessarily result in uphill approaches, because I tend to route many of my holes across valleys, as Pete Dye taught me.  But it does result in uphill recoveries for senior players and women who wind up short of many greens in regulation.  That's one of the things I really don't like about my courses in general, although I've done a few where we did a better job of that.  Pacific Dunes is a prime example -- we couldn't go across the valleys there, we tended to play along them, so the greens don't automatically sit up.

[Bill_McBride]

"I find a green site that sits up naturally, so I don't really have to worry about surface drainage issues, and then whittle away from it, although I'm often just playing with tiny amounts of cut and fill and rarely removing any material from the green site.  Bill finds a green site that sits lower, and builds up the green with sand fill to solve whatever drainage issues might result from the low spot.  That's one reason my greens tend to sit up closer to eye level [which I'm trying to cut back on]"

Tom - Doesn't this result in most holes playing up hill, or at least having uphill approachs? I've often wondered why you make some of your routing choices... playing to the high spots for drainage was my theory. I have not played many Tilllinghast courses, but of what I've seen he tended to do the same.

Similarly, many Ross holes play from an elevated green/tee site down into a valley and back up to a green on the next ridge.    Pine Needles is one exception where a number of the holes play from low to low over the ridges.