[Dan Herrmann]

In another thread, Tom Doak mentioned that distances to non-architects tend to appear much longer than they actually are.

I know that in my experience that it's very true.  

I've had the great fortune to see French Creek and Dismal River Red in the early days of construction, and I thought some of the holes could end up being a par 6!  However, my judgement was way, way off, and once playing, the holes that seemed so long were right in line with where they should have been.

Why is it that most of us would misjudge distances on nascent courses so badly?  

[Tom_Doak]

Two reasons:

1.  Golf courses actually take up a lot of ground.  A par-4 is a quarter mile from tee to green ... that's three times as far as the distance to the center field fence in a baseball stadium.  But you've grown accustomed to that, and when playing golf your brain zooms in on the target more than you realize.

2.  Without other golfers, mowing lines, and flags, your eyes don't recognize the site as a golf course and your brain doesn't zoom in the same way.  You see the land as big as it really is.  That's why we put golf flags out on the greens while we are building our courses, to try to help everyone look at it in context.

[Jim_Kennedy]

Dan,
This works like a charm, if there is something familiar in the general area

http://www.vendian.org/mncharity/dir3/bodyruler_angle/

[Ian Andrew]

Dan,

You have to anticipate the same thing with land forms.
Once you add the texture of turf, particularly rough height turf, they become far less pronounced than they look in dirt.
You have to accommodate for that in construction.

[Wade Whitehead]

This is true on courses that lack familiar context like in-play trees.  When I have first-time guests to Ballyhack, they often get to the first tee and say "Is this a par five?"  The hole is not even a long par four.  That often happens repeatedly throughout the round, since the playing corridors are typically not framed by trees or other large vegetation.  There just isn't anything with which to create scale (much like the more barren construction sites you mention).

WW

[Don_Mahaffey]

Dan,

You have to anticipate the same thing with land forms.
Once you add the texture of turf, particularly rough height turf, they become far less pronounced than they look in dirt.
You have to accommodate for that in construction.

Ian,
I agree with turf smoothing out the look.
One thing I believe is trying to make the ground look too perfect prior to grassing results in a very smooth looking golf course. I like a little edginess or abruptness, and I think everything seems to soften over time. Especially during construction as once a severe feature is built, it seems to soften as the irrigation, drainage, finish and grassing phases are completed.
Do you see this? Do you ever have to try and get the finish guys to leave some imperfection?

[Norbert P]

  It's a rare event for me to photograph dirt work.  It is a lesson in vanishing scale and contrast. I have tried to "paint in" bunkers and greens on the computer but it doesn't help me with the shaping work later.

 Don, your observations of smoothness reminds me of my own anxieties of the mysterious aptitude and attitude of box blade operators. Possibly the most overlooked skill in golf construction.

[Peter Pallotta]

This is fascinating. It reminds me of what director Frank Capra said about his early years with the talkies, when sound had first come to the movies. If you look at his films from the early to mid 1930s, you can see and hear what a jump up/improvement Capra made -- everything in his films (sound, movement, pacing etc) seems so much more natural than that of most of his contemporaries. Capra said he realized early on that there was something about the movie watching-listening experience, i.e. about being part of the audience, that seemed to make everything slow down and feel stilted to an audience. And so to counteract that, Capra made sure that everything sped up on set, while filming - he had his actors move around more quickly than 'normal', had them speaking/saying their lines faster than they would 'in real life', and that ended up having his characters/films seem so much more natural to the audience.

Don's point about allowing for the process of softening that comes with grassing and with time struck me as somewhat analogous. It's as if, with the always developing construction technology available, many architects and their associates didn't/don't allow for this process or even recognize it, and so they smoothed everything out (all the edginess and abruptness) too early, before the grassing -- which meant that after grassing the courses ended up too smooth and too perfect looking, and thus unnatural. I guess the golden agers didn't have this trouble because, even if they used machinery back then, it couldn't get rid of all the edges and contours and abruptness (as do today's machines), and so when the course was grassed and softened, you'd get what we think of as the naturalness of golden age design.

Peter

[Norbert P]

. . .  I guess the golden agers didn't have this trouble because, even if they used machinery back then, it couldn't get rid of all the edges and contours and abruptness (as do today's machines), and so when the course was grassed and softened, you'd get what we think of as the naturalness of golden age design.

Peter

  Fortunately, we have young artisans and future designers like Zack Vardy sculpting edges these days with a shovel to great results.

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