The very basics

[Peter Pallotta]

A decent writer will use active verbs. Readers can appreciate the difference between:
"The gun came into view, and a few moments later it was in his hands, and then the trigger was pulled."
And
"He saw the gun. He picked it up, and pulled the trigger."
Architects: please explain the basics to me.
I'm tired of asking about fundamental principles -- you never answer anyway.
So: in your art-craft, what are some of the equivalents to using active verbs?
Peter

[JESII]

Not an architect...and failed grammar every chance I had, but...isn't it the recovery shot?

[Mike_Young]

He saw the whole, he played the hole and removed the ball from the cup.

[BCrosby]

I like it, Mike.


Maybe gca is all passive voice, violating all the usual rules of good writing. For example:


A course design is found by an architect; the bunkers and other features of the course play golfers; and the quality of the design is borne by the architect.


Bob

[Adam Lawrence]

I like it, Mike.


Maybe gca is all passive voice, violating all the usual rules of good writing. For example:


A course design is found by an architect; the bunkers and other features of the course play golfers; and the quality of the design is borne by the architect.


Bob

Well, the question is what is the subject of the statement(s). A course design is not an independent actor and thus cannot do anything itself.

[Tom_Doak]

A decent architect will lay out holes so the golfer has a good sense of where he's going. 


A decent architect will build his tees close to the previous green so as not to waste space and time.


A decent architect will give the golfer a shot to play no matter where they have found themselves on a hole.

[BCrosby]

Adam -

I was having some fund above, but yep. We often talk about golf courses as if they were independent actors. (Which, as they say in philosophy 101, is a category mistake.)

Which means - as our friend John Low pointed out long ago -  that golf courses can't be 'fair' or 'unfair'. They just are.

Golf architects, on the other hand, are independent actors.


Bob

[Peter Pallotta]

Or, Adam, might not the golf course be the *lead* actor - the most important character of all? The title role? The 'Macbeth' in Macbeth, with all the rest of us/all other characters merely bit players strutting around and finding our places only in relation to this one 'star'? Laurence Olivier as King Lear - with Lear's *nature*, his essential character, being the very engine of the narrative, driving the lives and fates of every other character in the story. (Ah, like flies to wanton boys are we to the gods - they kill us for their sport!) Brando in/as The Godfather: asking, cajoling, threatening, demanding, dictating, making us offers that we can't refuse -- just nickels and dimes that jingle in his pocket.
Yes, yes indeed I think: great courses are designed by great architects to be all things: the star, the dramatic engine, and the centre around which golfers weave their own tales of sound and fury. Mediocre courses, on the other hand, were designed as merely pretty backgrounds and a set of props -- all to enable 3rd rate character actors to take centre stage for a rare few hours and hope to really shine! (Look ma - I made it to Broadway!!) Isn't that precisely what Ian A was complaining about in his "pandering" thread?
Oh, there are "basics" all right, to golf course architecture, and principles and even rules that should never be broken except on the rarest occasion and only by masters of the craft -- but it's becoming clear that architects simply won't put them down in black and white.
Peter
PS - thanks Bob and Tom, just saw your posts. Well, with Tom's post we have 3 basics!

[Jeff_Brauer]

Job one is to find 18 holes with good potential.


Job two is to craft them into good holes via feature design.


Job three is to flesh out the details like drainage and irrigation to make sure the ideals of Job one and Job two truly come to life and work for a lifetime.

[BCrosby]

Peter -


I think there are basic principles. TomD's 'Anatomy of a Golf Course' is a good intro to them. There are other good books which most of us are all familiar with.


The basics might not be talked about much these days, but they certainly were during the first three decades of the 20th century when they first emerged. I'd guess that they aren't talked about much today because the victory of 'strategic golf architecture' was so thorough back in the day. There is less need today to plow the same conceptual ground.


To be sure, there are all sorts of different design styles these days. The best are often edgy, unique or surprising. But in the end there aren't many architects today that reject outright the basic ideas behind strategic architecture. They violate them from time to time, they often try to mask them and certainly no one wants to be predictable or mechanical, but the basic principles have survived pretty well.


As support for that notion, note that you don't hear many modern architect's promoting their new designs by claiming they are penal architecture or bragging that their new designs reject lessons learned from TOC, CPC  or other classic courses. What you hear is the reverse of that.


(I would love to see a brochure for a new course that says something like "If you think Oakmont is hard, just wait until you play our new course!!" Or maybe "We have discarded the tired old design formula used at courses like ANGC in favor of ideas you have never seen anywhere before!!!" I'm being facetious, but you don't see that sort of stuff for a reason and I don't think it's purely about marketing.) 


Bob   

[Peter Pallotta]

Bob - Tom's book is the ideal primer, and Grounds for Golf is good too. I've read them both, quite closely. And yet they must not be providing (and/or I'm not getting from them) the kind of basics/fundamentals I'd like to understand. The 'problem' could well be all mine -- others here nor don't seem to share my confusion, and the architects clearly feel like the 'answers' have all and already been provided countless times. I suppose I'm looking for those rules/goals/truths of the craft that are most implicit to be made explicit.
There are reasons why a great lead character (in a book or film) is a great lead character -- there are hundred of different kinds of lead characters by hundreds of different creators (from Willa Cather to Woody Allen), and yet *how* a lead character works, and *why* are shared basics.

[Steve Lang]

   Peter,


Given the very basics of stick & ball play as: grip, stance, & swing... are you considering gca things at a level of:  route, root, & gravity?

[Jeff_Brauer]

Not sure that architects including marketing as one of the basics hasn't been a self fulfilling prophecy that it is?


I think one reason gca of today don't write too much of basics is they really aren't sure what they are, or just follow the old bosses directions without too much questions.  Or, they aren't too good at writing, a product of our declining public schools to be sure, who, IMHO, should teach those students to write gooder.


One of the reasons I participate here is that Dad told me if I couldn't express an idea in a few good sentences, it probably wasn't worth expressing.  One example is the most difficult to understand theory there is (probably) relativity.  If Einstein could narrow that down to one simple formula we can all recite from memory, seems like we could reduce the basics of golf course architecture to three things similar to mine or Steve Lang's.

[Peter Pallotta]

Thanks, Steve and Jeff.
Yes, I'm asking about those kind of basics.
Why? Because a description of how something works isn't an explanation of why it works.
Conventional wisdom does a whole lot of the former, and very little of the latter.
I'm more interested in what I'm not getting enough of than in what I've already been told a million times.
Peter

[Jeff_Brauer]

Peter,


Its an interesting topic.


I also believe that good design results from a good design process.  Analyze, conceptualize, finalize.


While there are some macro analysis items, like knowing what kind of soils you have, I am thinking more in terms of looking at a green site, and designing to that site, not forcing some pre-designed green (give me a no. 34 here, Fred!)  If it slopes sharply across, I fit a skinny green in. Big sites get big greens, small sites suggest small greens.  That type of thing.


I also think the finalize portion - not just doing the first thing that comes to mind - is important.  The best green designs usually evolve at least a bit.  While not very profitable, I think a lot about the green in plan, and then think about it again in the field after siting and tree clearing, sometimes re-drawing the plan.  And then of course work as the dozer works to refine more time.


Your experience might vary!  That's my story and I am sticking to it!

[Tom_Doak]

One more basic: the architect should try to find the widest variety of green sites possible.  I don't think many have really thought of it in those terms.

[Thomas Dai]

Angles?
Atb

[Jeff_Brauer]

Not that it matters, but I would lump both angles and variety of green sites into the "second level of thinking" group, not the very, very, basic group.

[Rich Goodale]

A golf course should be palpable and mute   

As a globed fruit,



Dumb

As old medallions to the thumb,



Silent as the sleeve-worn stone

Of casement ledges where the moss has grown—



A golf course should be wordless   

As the flight of birds.



                         *               



A golf course should be motionless in time   

As the moon climbs,



Leaving, as the moon releases

Twig by twig the night-entangled trees,



Leaving, as the moon behind the winter leaves,   

Memory by memory the mind—



A golf course should be motionless in time   

As the moon climbs.



                         *               



A golf course should be equal to:

Not true.



For all the history of grief

An empty doorway and a maple leaf.



For love

The leaning grasses and two lights above the sea—



A golf course should not mean   

But be.

[Peter Pallotta]

Mr Goodale!
You've been hiding your light under a bushel lo these many years!
There is some wonderful stuff there - just lovely.
Your gruff exterior clearly is meant to hide a poet's soul!


Jeff B -
I think it does matter, in ways though that I can't put my finger on. I appreciate you and Tom offering up these basics. Reading them, I realize that, in a very real sense, they aren't "basics" at all -- i.e. they are "essentials"!   

[BCrosby]

Good stuff Rich. A tip of the cap.

A delightful poem that expresses my own philosophical priors better than I am able.

Bob

[Jim Nugent]

A decent writer will use active verbs. Readers can appreciate the difference between:
"The gun came into view, and a few moments later it was in his hands, and then the trigger was pulled."
And
"He saw the gun. He picked it up, and pulled the trigger."
Architects: please explain the basics to me.
I'm tired of asking about fundamental principles -- you never answer anyway.
So: in your art-craft, what are some of the equivalents to using active verbs?
Peter

Some passive golf courses:  NGLA and Oakmont pre-clearing and renovation; Firestone South; Bellerive CC as I saw it back in the mid-late 1960s. 

Some active golf courses:  NGLA and Oakmont after renovation; Tobacco Road; ANGC, at least up till this millenium; lots of links courses. 

My distinction being active courses constantly engage/involve you in their strategy and play.  Passive courses take most of those decisions away from you. 

It's always interested me that scientists, scholars and academicians typically use highly passive voices when they write.  A veneer of objectivity that too often fails.

Peter, if you're looking for fundamental GCA principles, maybe Mackenzie's guidelines are a good jumping off point.   

[George Pazin]

A decent architect will give the golfer a shot to play no matter where they have found themselves on a hole.

I haven't played enough courses to really comment on this in a substantive manner, but still....


this is what I think most miss, architects and critics alike. They think the high handicapper wants easy. I think he just wants a chance. Finishing a hole with your ball is far far far far far more satisfying than figuring out your drop, even if it results in a higher score.


Of course, that's just my opinion, your mileage may vary, as another often says....

[Jeff_Brauer]

Jeff B -
I think it does matter, in ways though that I can't put my finger on. I appreciate you and Tom offering up these basics. Reading them, I realize that, in a very real sense, they aren't "basics" at all -- i.e. they are "essentials"!

I suspect the only essential is to make sure you have 18 holes, no? LOL, unless you amend the title to the basics for good design, or the basics for great design.

[BCrosby]

Jim - Interesting distinction.

Penal courses reduce human agency by limiting how you can play the course. Such courses ask for reactive, passive play.

Strategic courses call for more human agency. They ask for more initiative and active play.

Bob