Golden Age GCA - Who wasn't a minimalist?

[Jeff Schley]

In the thread of Ally's article Change for Change's Sake, it is mentioned, "The rough and ready side of golf course architecture slowly diminished through the twentieth century. By introducing the strategic school, the virtuoso architects of the roaring twenties were innovative with hole routings and hazard placements, but they were already moving away from lay-of-the land green sites to a more built solution, ‘modern’ design as Bernard Darwin called it."

Yes the golden age was golden by looking back and seeing what treasures we have today, however what choices did they really have? Consider equipment of the day for example. Horses and pick axes kind of limit your "creativity" doesn't it? It is like telling someone please go build me a house but you can't use a hammer.

Were there any course GCA's or courses specifically that weren't minimalist in nature?  I know AGNC famously chopped down trees, but that was probably an outlier high dollar project. Steamshovels weren't common until the 1920's so anything that time or before was done the old fashioned way.

[Gib_Papazian]

NGLA and Timber Point are hardly "minimalist."


Yes, C.B. found "natural" spots for a Redan and the Alps, but the rest of the greens are full-rip *designed.*


Dat ain't no C&C course . . . .


You think George Crump might have cut a few trees in Clementon?


Maybe our resident Genius can tell us - that is out of my expertise and curriculum - but was Hell's Half Acre just sitting there, waiting to be found?


What all this "minimalist" shit really means is the hand of man was thoughtfully integrated with the hand of God after you came upon it.


It reminds me (painfully) of a feature Neal and I found on #11, when doing a rebuild at Richmond CC. There was - from another incarnation of the hole - this really cool irregular mound, adjacent to the green . . . . . think about the back swale at GCGC #9, except not yet integrated into the putting surface.


Still with me, right? That was not the hand of God, it was leftover entrails of a redo from decades previously.


We thought it was a terrific thing not to disturb, but not three days later (Scotty Clem took a couple days off), the "B" team did not see the flags and bulldozed it. We tried to recreate it, but providence gave us but one chance and it never looked right.


Goes back to my conversation at Bandon with David Kidd . . . . . does anybody REALLY know what was "created" out of whole cloth, what was sitting there waiting to be found - or which specific features a little bit of God and a whole lot of thoughtful integration?


I'm guessing drag pans or not, every single Golden Age green "natural" complex had more tweaks than you'll ever imagine. 


       

[Tom_Doak]

Maybe architects don't philosophize as much as you think they do. 


Maybe we take what we think is the best approach to each property, and sometimes that involves moving a lot of earth, and sometimes not.


There were certainly some architects in the past 30 years that got so used to moving earth to build things, that they didn't know how not to.  But, as Ally points out, there are very very few who were really the other way around, who never moved dirt on projects, even if they had a bit more budget or even if the site needed it.


It was Ron Whitten who coined the term "minimalism" while trying to describe what Coore and Crenshaw and I [and he also included Donald Steel] were doing.  The example he used of my work in that article was the original course at Stonewall -- where I had to move 200,000+ yards of dirt, because I was working from Tom Fazio's routing.     Golf courses really aren't built to be written about.

[Peter Pallotta]

Ah!! That's exactly it -- the explanation for everything! What's happened since the early renaissance is that the 'description' has become the 'prescription'! Eh? What do you think? Am I right or am I right?

PS
Tom and Gib had pretty good posts too, I don't want to minimize that. They may or may not have informed my own

[Sven Nilsen]

The other factor to consider in analyzing the Golden Age (which has been variably defined as (a) the first 30 years of American Golf, (b) 1910 to 1930 and (c) everything between the wars) is budget.


There were projects like Aronimink, where Ross moved a ton of dirt and used steam shovels to do so.  There are also courses like the NLE Bob O'Links 9 holer in Dallas that was built by one man and a team of mules.  For every Lido, there were multiple midwest courses where an architect left behind a routing and the members came out to clear the land of brush.  Bendelow wasn't going to give the members of these small town clubs too ambitious a project to handle, yet he wanted them to have a serviceable course so that they'd be sure to keep placing those orders for clubs and balls from A. G. Spaulding.


The scale of some of the more expensive courses was probably hard to imagine.  Most of the courses in New England (and other parts of the country) had to painstakingly clear the grounds of glacial debris, often using dynamite to do so.  Even with just horses and pickaxes, some of the endeavors were very ambitious.  And sometimes not everything went to plan.  Charles River saw its 17th and 18th holes have to be altered on the ground from the original plan as what lay under the dirt in those areas would have been too much of a project to remove.


But for every course built for the likes of E. F. Hutton, the Vanderbilts and other lesser known robber barons, there were plenty of clubs where the architect knew the club didn't have the resources to create a course seemingly out of nothing, and therefore had to draw the plans accordingly. 


One other larger factor has to do with the advent of the automobile, and the ability to build courses further from population centers.  When courses were restricted to locations near towns or train lines, the concept of ground suited for the game was probably not much of a factor.  It wasn't until after World War I that you start to commonly hear about architects being brought in to visit a number of proposed sites (NGLA being one obvious exception to this concept). 


It would have been much easier to be a "minimalist" on a site suited for its purpose.


Sven

[SL_Solow]

Yale?  Minimalist?  Always a matter of degree depending on the site, the budget and the preferences of the architect.  I suspect that the budget is often a critical factor.

[Ally Mcintosh]

Tom’s example of Stonewall brings up something that I didn’t mention specifically in the article or the other thread, namely that minimalism in the modern sense is almost always determined at routing stage.


When I was doing the EIGCA education course, we did numerous design projects over those two years. On each one, I used to tear my hair out for hours, days or weeks trying to work out the best routing on each site (which were all tight and awkward). I was never happy until I got a course that flowed well, felt like a journey and crucially had 18 holes that stood up over the contours presented on the topo…. sure I knew that I would need to build most of the greens and many of the tees but the skeleton of the hole strategies sat on the natural land.


We’d then present these master plans to the judges. The fun part was looking at what each of the other students had come up with. This usually resulted in a bunch of 18 hole routings that had blown through hills and forests but had been rendered beautifully so as to the uninitiated, they looked like a great solution. “Anyone can route a course like that” was usually my thought. Amazingly, the fact that X’s routing might mean 5 times the earth movement and double the budget of my routing didn’t often get picked up by the judges. I kinda realised then how much of the business is sales and presenting well.

[Gib_Papazian]

Sven does make a good point - although how much of Tom Bendelow's oeuvre still exists today? The Central Valley is still crawling with "farmer jobs," built from rough routing plans left by a drive-by architect. . . . . I still believe even Sequoyah in Oakland (orig. Raynor) was built from a quicky drawing.


Most of these "minimalist" course that still exist in mostly original form are rudimentary at best . . . . bunker left, bunker right, back-to-front slope and planted trees used to establish and define corridors.


Minimalism may also be the father and mother of early "quirk" - especially in the rocky, woodsy Northeast, with short construction seasons and lack of heavy equipment.


Jim Engh's design style would have been impossible in the Golden Age (stealing Sven's thought) on most sites - except with virtually unlimited money and manpower.


Got a chuckle out of TD's post . . . . . *of course* he had to move 200K yards + for a Fazio routing. When you already believe yourself to be a God and money is no object, there is no reason to seek out the hand of nature.


It would be a fabulously entertaining exercise to see what TD, C&C, Gil or the usual suspects would design next door to Shadow Creek. Steve Wynn money, no constraints, no budget, dead flat sand.


If it was me - and time was also unlimited - it would be interesting to rough out a series of mounds and swales, criss-crossing the property and let weather and nature have at it for a season or two. Then figure out the routing - sort of a petri dish to artificially create the hand of God . . . . which only makes sense if you read it twice.


P.S. Let's not forget that one of our posters on this thread designed his (arguable) magnum opus with only two par 4's on the back nine (one drivable if you've got a death wish) with a little bitty pitch & putt hole. You cannot philosophize about pushing the envelope between nature and nurture if you don't care about the envelope to begin with . . . . . and if golf courses were not meant to be written about, where the heck did my insanely large library come from? And why are we here?   


   

[Thomas Dai]

Small stone, stick, hole in the ground?
atb

[Tom_Doak]

You cannot philosophize about pushing the envelope between nature and nurture if you don't care about the envelope to begin with . . . . . and if golf courses were not meant to be written about, where the heck did my insanely large library come from? And why are we here?   

Gib:

On the other discussion board where I participate [which is NOT about golf], someone yesterday wrote about American foreign policy,

"We have moved on from creating propaganda to justify our actions to taking actions to satisfy our propaganda."

C. B. Macdonald made the Biarritz hole one of his templates, because he loved the idea of making golfers hit a long shot onto the front of the green and run it through the swale.

Young architects today build a Biarritz hole to associate themselves with Macdonald, and to pander to all the golf writers who fawn over such templates.  In most cases, the shot that Macdonald visualized doesn't even work on them nowadays!

[Tom_Doak]

The fun part was looking at what each of the other students had come up with. This usually resulted in a bunch of 18 hole routings that had blown through hills and forests but had been rendered beautifully so as to the uninitiated, they looked like a great solution. “Anyone can route a course like that” was usually my thought. Amazingly, the fact that X’s routing might mean 5 times the earth movement and double the budget of my routing didn’t often get picked up by the judges. I kinda realised then how much of the business is sales and presenting well.

Occasionally, back in the day, I would see the plans for a course by one of the big names, routed on the topo.  Quite often I would have the same reaction as you did with your fellow students . . . or even more cringey than that.  They would start a hole 100 or 150 yards on the wrong side of a ridge, with the rest of the hole falling the other way, so they'd have to do a ton of earthwork just to make the landing area visible, when they could easily have made the previous hole longer, and that hole shorter. 


They obviously didn't care about fitting the holes to the topo at all.  Sometimes I wondered if they had even been looking at the topo when they did the routing.

[Gib_Papazian]

TD,


Quote of the year. Please PM me the website, although like FB, zero chance I will ever have time to contribute in the future. You spend a lot of time on airplanes, so might be a nice break from 24/7 golf architecture.


As for your last post:



I award myself special dispensation - and immunity from criticism  - to fawn over C.B. and Raynor templates. I literally could hardly sleep after our walk around Old Macdonald, knowing I would by playing it the next day.


And you *are* the guy recreating Lido . . . . . . expect the fawning "turned up to eleven."


But your point is well taken. Most legit gunners don't even think about running their approach through the Biarritz swale no more than they try to use the contours of the Redan to swing their ball to the back left.


Just tee up an 8-iron - and hit a towering 200 yard blast that drops next to the pin like a mud hen turd.


Us mortals still have to navigate these holes in traditional ways - and to be honest, I am thankful the tee shot over Mangrove Lake and that ass-puckering approach remain a satisfying challenge - but how to design a modern hole to make Brooks or Bryson think hard probably does not include C.B./Raynor templates any longer.


It is really a pity . . . . but how to slow down those howitzers now rests with architects like you. When my opinion gets solicited - like my taste in music - my visions never get past about 1980.

[Mark_Fine]

To put it more simply - It all depended on THE BUDGET!

[Tim Martin]

To put it more simply - It all depended on THE BUDGET!

Yale’s $400,000 was grande for the mid 1920’s.

[Philip Gordillo]

"Young architects today build a Biarritz hole to associate themselves with Macdonald, and to pander to all the golf writers who fawn over such templates.  In most cases, the shot that Macdonald visualized doesn't even work on them nowadays!"


I have yet to see anyone fly it to the rear of our new Biarritz at Metairie CC from my 12 round sample size.  Club choice is usually driver and 3W since it plays about 220-230yds from the blue.  When successful, most guys are running it through the swale.  Maybe this template is still playing as designed for the typical weekend hacker.   

[Tom_Doak]

"Young architects today build a Biarritz hole to associate themselves with Macdonald, and to pander to all the golf writers who fawn over such templates.  In most cases, the shot that Macdonald visualized doesn't even work on them nowadays!"


I have yet to see anyone fly it to the rear of our new Biarritz at Metairie CC from my 12 round sample size.  Club choice is usually driver and 3W since it plays about 220-230yds from the blue.  When successful, most guys are running it through the swale.  Maybe this template is still playing as designed for the typical weekend hacker.   

Probably works better on brand new, firm, dwarf bermuda greens than it does in other conditions!  But what % of the time do you land on the front and wind up on the back?

[Tony_Muldoon]

Playing a new course I often like to stand behind the green and look back.


Surprising how often on Golden Age courses this reveals the many hands of men who worked hard.

[Tom_Doak]

Playing a new course I often like to stand behind the green and look back.


Surprising how often on Golden Age courses this reveals the many hands of men who worked hard.

That's an interesting quote but I'd like to hear you elaborate on it a bit more.