While reading Douglas Murphy’s The Architecture of Failure (Zer0 Books, 2016), a specific passage halted my attention. In turn, I applied it to a golfing context, somewhat unconsciously perhaps, since I hadn’t originally sought the book with the Royal and Ancient game in mind.
In this specific passage, which he then expands upon at some length, Murphy claims that when regarding the boom of “great railway stations” of the mid 19th century in England, contemporary critics of the period expressed “the success with which the architecture of the building resolved the “engineering” part, regarding the tension between the quantifiable and the ineffable.” Murphy proceeds to elucidate that according to the commonly held views of the era, “the engineer had nothing to do but solve the problem as it was presented to them, their “solution” could never be architecture, which had the more difficult task of expressing what it did; of communicating its purpose by making a statement within an already established language, to which access is restricted.”
A trained engineer himself, Murphy is an often imprecise and unfocused writer, and his book suffers from it to a certain extent. However, after many digressions, he returns to this distinction between “the engineer” and “the architect”, in his chapter-length explorations of “modernity and the engineer genius” and then “solutionism.”
He claims that ‘the cult of the engineer-genius that began in the 19th century is as strong as ever,” and that “there is a popular image of this character; a no-nonsense man capable of overcoming insurmountable technical challenges.” In effect, I would suggest that this dichotomy, between “the architect” whose works expresses “its communicative purpose within an already established language” on the one hand and the “engineer” whose work allegedly seeks to solve problems as they are presented on the other, essentially encompasses, more or less, the ethos of every notable school of golf design over the course of the last century into two distinct categories, beginning with the Victorian school led by Tom Dunne and ending with King-Collins.
(Of course, I understand that there are, as with any such imperfect wide net casting exercises, a few designers who—either in general, or at different stages of their careers—are more difficult to place within either category, but alas. Moreover I am not seeking to suggest that the “golf designer” grouped as an “architect”—according to Murphy’s framework—is a lesser practitioner than the golf designer classified as “engineer”. Or vice-versa. )
For however many centuries, from the game’s beginnings until the end of the 19th century, golf design was quite rudimentary, with its practitioners only sculpting and altering the natural playing area very marginally. The hands of time and chance shaped these early links, far more than those of man and machine. However, as the game grew in popularity and London, in particular, became a golf-thirsty market, a demand for easily accessible and economic golf courses that could be built rapidly developed. Tom Dunn, whose “formative years (and likely his understanding of golf) were not shaped by the happenings on the links” according to Keith Cutten (The Evolution of Golf Course Architecture), seized this growing opportunity and designed more than 130 golf courses. In the last decade of the 19th century alone, 550 golf clubs were formed in England, an impressive tally considering that there were merely 12 golf courses in the country not twenty-five years prior.
Having learned to play at Blackheath and Wimbledon, where he learned design, construction, and maintenance from both his father and uncle, Dunn faced the “simple” (or not so simple) problem of featureless parcels of heavily soiled land that needed to be quickly and cheaply transformed into grounds for golf. Unlike the earlier practitioners who were routinely gifted with dunesland fit for golf, Dunn had to develop a style and implement an architecture that could be ready in a few weeks, in many instances. As Michael Morrison highlights in his study of Dunn in the latest edition of Through The Green, “the land for a new golf course was commonly leased on a short-term basis. Furthermore, the initial intake of founder members usually received the inducement of not having to pay an entrance fee while annual subscriptions were often around one guinea. Under such conditions, golf clubs were not prepared to take the risk of making large capital outlays on their courses.”
Few blind shots, a limited number of crossovers holes, and perhaps a distinct feature or two, such as cross-bunkers or a green hidden behind a vertical bank of sod, were the “simple problems” that the designer was tasked to solve in his construction, and often the golf course disappeared within a few years of being built. In fact, merely a handful of Dunn’s 130 plus golf courses remain at least in some semblance of their original iterations. In effect, these were “simple”, utilitarian objects, not aesthetic constructions meant to stand the test of time.
Timespan, ethos-wise, and in terms of posthumous legacy, Dunn’s closest counterpart was likely Tom Bendelow, the “Johnny Appleseed of American Golf” who is credited with having designed more than 600 golf courses, according to one estimate. His designs were quite similar in style and construction to Dunn’s, and, likewise, hardly any of them stood the test of time.
Stuart Bendelow notes that Tom believed that his courses “should present enjoyable play for both beginner and advanced players; not too hard to discourage the new player and not without challenge to the more accomplished golfer.” Working wide and far, Bendelow was able to craft simple, effective layouts, regardless of the soil, land, or acreage of a given property. Thus, like Dunn, he very much adhered to what Murphy cited as the “engineer-genius” of the Victorian and early 20th, “a no-nonsense man capable of overcoming insurmountable technical challenges.”
Both were problem solvers, providing costly and time-sensitive works that were instrumental in the growth of the game. Neither’s works expressed their purpose by making a statement within an already established language, that of the great links of Scotland, the standard, then as now, to which all golf design should, allegedly, aspire.
However, for this very reason, quite quickly their works came under intense scrutiny from younger, often independently wealthy and college educated golfers, who’d thus possessed the means to travel and see the great links of Scotland and, upon returning to London, found the Victorian school comparatively derivative and lacking in interest and aesthetic beauty—in effect, simple products fit for simple purposes. As with industrial design of the Victorian era, Murphy emphasizes that “this particular conceptual “relationship” to construction, whereby it is understood only as a selection of problems of simple delineation and implicit usefulness, is a powerful and, I would argue, a damaging one. It creates a condition whereby the architect or designers sees their role and relevance primarily as a solver of simple problems.” In fact, like Morrison, I would argue likewise.
Morrison notes that Harry Colt, a Cambridge trained barrister, commented “on how little thinking went into their designs and the speed at which they laid out a golf course”. That Tom Simpson, another trainer barrister who came from a wealthy industrial family, “pilloried their lack of imagination” and that “they failed to reproduce any of the features of the courses on which they were bred and born.” And, lastly, that Alister Mackenzie wrote that “almost all the new golf courses in the Victorian era were planned by professionals and were, incidentally, amazingly bad.”
There were others, too, who added their criticisms to this pile, among which we find many of the leading figures of the next generation of golf designers, one that would subsequently be viewed as ‘the golden era.” Returning to the late 19th century delineation between “engineer” and “architect” to which Murphy calls attention in his book, in effect, rather than view themselves as solvers of problems (as “engineers”), they viewed themselves as architects—or artists if you will—whose works sought to express “its communicative purpose within an already established language.” Morrison states that the comparison between the methods Vicrtorians and those of their younger critics could “not be starker. They (Mackenzie, Simpson, Travis and co) had ample time and money to design and construct their classic courses. Their university education enabled them to draw on improving knowledge of agronomy and advances in technology to lay out better courses. Most of them were independently wealthy and hence could focus on solely designing courses, eventually forming their own golf architecture businesses.”
“Rather than having animal-graved pasture for fairways, these new-style golf courses were sown with grass seed,” continues Morrison, “commonly bents and fescues to replicate the character of linkland. Similarly, the new bunkering was constructed to look more natural, with Mackenzie in particular specializing in large, wild-looking sandy expanses on fairways and greenside. And lastly, the greens were no longer small patches of flat-land, they were undulating large undulating surfaces that had to be man-made, turfed or seeded, and with water laid-on. It is not surprising that the laying out of a rudimentary course in a few weeks of effort in the 1890s became close to two years of toil to create the golf courses designed by this next generation.”
“The chief object of every golf architect or greenkeeper worth his salt is to imitate the beauties of nature so closely as to make his work indistinguishable from nature itself,” famously claimed Dr. Mackenzie. “Avoid artificial construction work as much as possible, and when resort must be had to it see that it harmonizes with the surrounding ground,” echoed Tom Simpson.
And perhaps most eloquently, after rueing the unnaturalness of the work of Dunn and the other Victorians, Max Behr emphasized that “but that which in linksland appealed unconsciously to the golfer was the absence of any evidence of man’s handiwork. He was in the presence of Nature unstained by artificiality. The merit of this gradually came to be realized. Its recognition is revealed in the efforts now being made to achieve naturalness in construction of the various features that go to make up a golf course. The straight line has well-nigh disappeared from our bunkers, tees and greens. They are acquired curves. Without doubt this phase is more pleasing to the eye. But the arbitrary manner in which we continue to deal with these components makes them manifest an individuality apart from their surroundings. We have succeeded in prettifying them, but we remain under the delusion that what is pretty, or picturesque, is beautiful.”
Applying Murphy’s terms, Behr thus essentially proposed that the Victorians work, their “solution”, “could never be architecture, which had the more difficult task of expressing what it did”, and, in turn, what his architecture expressed—or sought to express—was of course that intangible quality of playing upon the undisturbed, random, rugged, and raucous land crafted by the hands of chance and change in Scotland. Whether, or how successfully, they accomplished this task of imitating mother nature can be debated and dissected; what cannot be debated, however, was their intention, their desire that their work “communicate its purpose by making a statement within an already established language.”
From the lessons passed on, either in practice or in theory, by the golden age practitioners, a line of influence can thus be drawn to the “minimalist” movement that dominated from the 1990s to this day. Of course, for a variety of reasons, “minimalism”, at least as it was understood and practiced originally, morphed into something other a while ago now; yet, its practitioners and their offsprings (Doak, Coore and Crenshaw, Hanse, W.A.C., Devries, Phillips, etc) do still, despite an increase in earth-moving and shaping, seek to express an element of original ethos of the Scottish links in their work. Take Cabot Links or Kingsbarns, as examples, where both Rod Whitman and Kyle Phillips and co used modern technology to create what are essentially golf courses that look and feel crafted a hundred years ago. In both cases, they communicate their purposes “by making a statement within an already established language.”
Now, conversely, examine Whistling Straits, where Pete Dye similarity transformed a “seaside” property, but in a totally different sense. There are, without a doubt, aesthetic pleasures to be found when examining Pete Dye’s golf courses, but they are of a technically marvelous variety, similar, for example, to those great victorian-era train stations that populate the U.K. His golf courses, eye-catching as many of them certainly are, never really seek to blend in with or emulate the surrounding landscape, but instead commonly stand in stark contrast to it, thanks to the vertical lines, use of railroad-ties, and cone-like mounding, among other things.
Although Dye mentored many of the “minimalists” (including most notably Bill Coore and Tom Doak and Rod Whitman), his work has most in common with that of Seth Raynor, who was, himself, a trained civil engineer before working for C.B. MacDonald. In fact, Dye cited Raynor as his biggest influence in Bury Me in a Pot Bunker (which I haven’t read, but was alerted to).
As with Dye’s work, linear shaping, abrupt faces, harsh mounding, severely angled fairways and greens characterize Raynor’s work. Moreover, like Dye, Raynor’s work is of a technically marvelous variety, more so than a naturally pleasing one, with much of it being built on rather nondescript land, where, like Dunn and the other Victorian engineers, he proposed solutions to the problems he faced. For Raynor, as for MacDonald, his mentor, that solution was most commonly of course the use of templates, which, in my estimation, work best when they are not forced into the land (i.e. where the land is a blank slate).
Where the vast, vast majority of writing focused on golf design has failed, however, is in its failure to consider golf courses as genuine cultural productions: that golf course design has been influenced by factors—social, economic, artistic, etc—beyond merely those of the enclosed golfing sphere. As Murphy reminds us, “architecture cannot help but be significant,” and as Keith Cutten claims “precious little (if anything) has been published about the evolution of golf course architecture, and the reasons why these changes occurred.” In effect, that golf courses can and must be analyzed as valuable and ephemeral cultural productions just as novels, poems, films, and music have been for centuries in academia, especially, but also in more popular press.
Judging Raynor’s work, then, within the zeitgeist of the period when he was building golf courses—that of the “high modernist period” following World War 1—, his use of templates, of picking and choosing bits of popular culture’s past and, in turn, incorporating them in different ways in his own work, falls in line with what many modernists were doing in other arts, most notably James Joyce in Ulysses and T.S. Eliot in The Wasteland and many of his other poems. Eliot, in perhaps his most known piece of criticism, Tradition and the Individual Talent, asserts that an artist has to know “the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer,” while, simultaneously, expressing their contemporary environment.” That, as the spiritual leader of modernist writers Ezra Pound famously stated, they “ought to make it new.” And this is very much what Raynor did, building and applying known templates built, and thus reflecting, the mechanical advancements of the early 20th century: his designs are familiar albeit still new; they seek to solve problems through the new “language” that Raynor (and C.B. MacDonald) created.
But often, his work, like Dye’s, has been derided, by some, for being too mechanical, too stiff, too repetitive. What it requires, I would suggest, is an admiration for its craft and proficiency, the manner in which Raynor fits his templates like pieces of a puzzle and adapts them to their different surroundings—similar to how one marvels at Eliot’s allusions and poetic structures, rather than at his poetic cadences or his imagery, as one does with the romantic poetry of Wordsworth or Keats, for example. If you will, Eliot’s poetry comes largely from his brain, whereas Wordsworth’s comes from the gut.
After the Golden Age, as the gloom of the great depression increased and right-wing fanaticism pushed Europe towards another war, Robert Trent Jones’ career was beginning and would shape the trajectory (both to model and to subvert against) of the practice for the next half-century. Although he began working under Stanley Thompson, whose placement in one category or the other is difficult to pin-point, Trent Jones was unabashedly of the “engineering” ethos, portraying and selling himself to prospective clients as the “no-nonsense man capable of overcoming insurmountable technical challenges.”
The foremost problem Trent Jones sought to solve was, what he viewed as, the already and ever-growing obsoleteness of golden age golf courses due to the more rapidly improving technological advancements in equipment and fitness and technique, culminating in Ralph Guldahl’s dismantling of Oakland Hills at the 1937 U.S. Open.
His biographer, James R. Hansen, emphasizes that “Robert embraced these innovations, envisioning a bright boundless future for golf both in the United States and abroad. He saw great potential in the dynamics of modern industrial society for fundamental improvements in the design and construction of golf courses and in how the modern golf designer could enrich the challenges of the traditional game with new strategic features.” Once again, as with Raynor and Dunn and later Pete Dye, whose “engineering” approach to the practice was far different than his however, Trent Jones developed a style and ethos of architecture that did not express “its communicative purpose within an already established language.” His was very much his own; it was new and controversial and innovative and, yes, wayward and harmful.
And from Robert Trent Jones, we can trace a line of influence down to Dick Wilson, to Tom Fazio, to Jack Nicklaus (even though he worked with Pete Dye), to his sons Rees and Robert Trent Jones Jr, to Doug Carrick and Thomas Mcbroom in Canada.
