Golf course architect, between art and industry

by: Denys Lémery

The development of golf and the demand for golf courses turned golf course architecture in to a profession. When land that was naturally suitable for playing golf became a rare commodity the services of men 'of art',or architects, had to be called upon although in this case a very specific kind of art is involved.

All Beethoven needed was a quill pen and some lined paper to compose his prodigious symphonies, Picasso needed a canvas and some paint to create Les Demoiselles d'Avignon', but ultimately it didn't actually matter whether these masterpieces were seen or heard.

All Beethoven needed was a quill pen and some lined paper to compose his prodigious symphonies, Picasso needed a canvas and some paint to create 'Les Demoiselles d'Avignon', but ultimately it didn't actually matter whether these masterpieces were seen or heard. Golf course architecture always depends on reality, it requires organisation, talent, originality,hard work and skill, but also considerable resources. It is an art, but also an industry. Many players do not know the name of the architect who actually designed their local golf course,but a sculptor of open spaces was needed to create it, just like an architect was required to design and build their house or the cathedral in their city. The golf course architect's profession generates vast sums of money, which is quite curious since it has nothing to do with praising God or extolling the great people of this world, but is about organising the most absurdly gripping game in the world, which involves getting a ball in a hole in as few strokes as possible.

The golf course architect is a stage director and the enemy of the players, because his aim is simply to prevent the player from succeeding or at the very least forcing him to excel himself in order to succeed. The course is the golfer's main adversary, but it is also a companion or a dream-maker since it incites psychological, high spirited and aesthetic emotions.

The development of the golf course architect's profession would justify a book in its own right, but we will only confine ourselves here to certain leads and references in order to gain a better understanding.

Golf course architecture always depends on reality, it requires organization, talent, originality, hard work and skill, but also considerable resources.

Pre-history of golf course architecture

Initially, the only architect was Mother Nature,who has been a time-honoured model for all architects to emulate. Players followed suit, mapping out routes on their pieces of land, planting flags here and there, allowing the indigenous sheep to keep the grass down and hollowing out bunkers to provide shelter against the wind. And so it was that Musselburgh, Muirfield, St Andrews and other links were born.

In those days golf was often played in communal areas where other activities were happening simultaneously, on land that was seemingly unsuitable for cultivation and which today, would make any architect's mouth water. In the second half of the 19th century, golf professionals came on the scene and were offered modest sums to 'design'courses.

Of course it was the better players among them who were approached,those who played particularly well in those early tournaments and those who had the most experience of the game. As Harry Shapland Colt pointed out,"at that time golf course architects weren't even heard of, the pros marked out the tees, bunkers and greens with pegs." This practical approach was not such a bad one even though the courses were rudimentary and unconcerned with aesthetics. “I hope to live to see the day when there are crowds of municipal courses cropping up all over England. It would help enormously in increasing the virility, the health and the prosperity of the nation, and would do much to counteract discontent and Bolshevism.” Alister MacKenzie The square-shaped green at the 18th on the Old Course at St Andrews bears witness to this,as does Pinehurst No.1, which is preserved in its original condition.The 'golf course architects'of that period were Old Tom Morris, Tom and Willie Dunn, the Duncan brothers and Willie Park. Courses are organised as a series of successive holes because it would be tedious to have one starting and one finishing point and because the pleasure of the game can be sustained if players reach individual objectives successively before the final outcome is actually achieved.

Like a boxing match, which can be played over fifteen rounds, golf is played over long or short and difficult or moderately difficult holes. The design of golf courses and their related hazards depended of course on the amateur's game and the playing equipment he used in order to determine the length and shape of the hole. Consequently, as it was quite difficult to lift the balls, firstly the feather variety and then the gutta percha ones,the first hazards were intended to punish those players who played topped shots which saw the beginning of bunkers that ran across the fairway,often followed by mounds constructed with earth taken from the surrounding area.

These interventions were in fact the beginning of alterations to the natural topography where the land was adapted to the game and no longer the other way around.

Experts are required

Golf gradually becomes more popular with new balls at cheaper prices, demand is increasing, but as land on the seaside is becoming scarce and is often located at quite a distance from towns and cities, 'inland'courses are now beginning to materialise.

Since the land available is not naturally suited to golf, the services of genuine experts are now required to design and build courses, to mark them out through forests, to find appropriate soils, such as sandy grounds or heath land. And if a sandy terrain is not available, one requires the technical know-how to alter and adapt those particular soils so detested by Donald Ross, "Soils of a clay mixture are to be avoided if possible. “They are difficult to drain and must be given much costly attention to produce satisfactory turf. They are muddy and slippery when it rains. During the hot months, they are hard and baked." Money and technology. These two words will shape the evolution of the golf course architect's profession. In 1916, the players who were paid to design courses lost their amateur status.

This short-lived ruling was the first step towards the creation of a bona fide profession, that of the golf course architect. In the old days it was easy to work on a links course, move a bunker, a hillock or even a green,but now everything had to be planned in advance in order to respect a budget and ensure a return on the initial investment. After the First World War designing and constructing courses became a genuine industry. Architects have to know how to read contour maps, interpret aerial photographs and spend time on the proposed site.

Alister MacKenzie applied his experience of camouflage he had learnt during the war to golf and even went so far as to make models of his greens so that he could provide a better explanation to his workers about what they were supposed to be doing. His definition of the profession was as cruel as it was terse, "The test for a good golf architect is the power of converting bad inland material into a good course, and not the power of fashioning excellent seaside material into a mediocre one."

James Braid became one of the most prolific course designers and it was said that the total length of the courses he had designed was longer than the length and breadth of Great Britain put together. Harry Colt can't have been far behind him. Tom Simpson was an aesthete, who drove a Rolls Royce.But the profession really took off in the United States. The services of the Scots, Willie Dunn,MacKenzie and Charles Blair McDonald were imported for thousands of dollars, but it was primarily Donald Ross who established the true principles of golf course architecture, by paying attention to each and every detail and transforming the profession into an art and a lucrative business. Between the two World Wars whilst Walter Hagen was barely winning 1,000 dollars a year at tournaments, Donald Ross made 30,000 dollars overseeing the construction of 45 courses in just one year. 3,000 people worked on these courses using very basic equipment such as shovels, pickaxes, horses and carts.

The fundamental philosophy held by Ross still influences architects today, "The course must be a pleasure to golfers, rather than a monotony, where the putt must be just as much a reason to study as the drive or pitch. It must be as scenic as possible. The hazards should be shaped, not merely holes cut in the ground and filled with sand. It is quite easy to make a course too difficult just by length. A course must be laid out in such a manner that the good short golfer can get to the green quite as well as the long hitter.

“The average player whose game ranges between 90 and 100 has to be taken into consideration as well as the professional player." The years between 1920 and 1929 were the 'Golden Years' when the number of golf courses in the United States increased from 1,900 to 5,600.

Yale Country Club was built at a cost of one million dollars and the captains of industry became the sponsors of those who sculptured the land. The architects were not just teachers or professionals. Informed amateurs tried their hand at the profession and with some educational courses and an elementary knowledge of landscaping became 'architects'.

Henry Fownes,the son of a steel magnate,built Oakmont. Neville and Grant designed Pebble Beach and Tillinghast created Baltusrol and Winged Foot before being ruined by the 1929 depression which closed more than 600 golf courses.

Machines transform the profession

After the doom and gloom at the end of the Second World War golf returned to the limelight. Courses had to be restored giving work to the unemployed. The profession was officially recognised in a pronouncement made by President Eisenhower and mechanisation revolutionised the work of the golf course architect.Bulldozers that had been invented for war invaded golf course building sites thereby saving time and money, but also enabling the creation of a natural environment that was true to life, literally turning a piece of land upside down and creating a golf course that was one of a kind. One had to invent and produce continuously which resulted in the destruction of a lot of virgin land in South of Florida for example. With more money available, machinery and regained prosperity, more than 500 courses were built each year in the USA alone and as many again across the rest of the world. Not only golf clubs, but resorts too, state of the art golfing resorts and golf courses with real estate for the retired rich. For a time courses were built anywhere and everywhere, but it became virtually impossible to build on land by the sea and it was no longer possible to tear up forests to make way for golf courses as environmental restrictions became more and more rigid and water management more problematic. Now, more than ever before, professionals were needed to transform unsuitable land into something satisfactory enough to play on. Fallow agricultural land, rocky terrain and even former rubbish tips were transformed into vast open green spaces. The architects lived with restrictions, but they also developed their imaginations. Robert Trent Jones became a leading name thanks to his genius, but also on account of his ability to adapt to the needs of his clients and produce made to measure class. A former insurance salesman, Pete Dye, played the iconoclast card in what was an extremely uniform and unruffled world. In creating the TPC at Sawgrass he broke with Donald Ross's 'nice' ideas and with the moderation of Trent Jones. Sawgrass is a course for the pros, which Ben Crenshaw dislikes intensely, 'It's like a golf course out of Star Wars designed by Darth Vadar."

Sawgrass with its famous island green was copied by many, and represented not only a model of imagination and an awareness of the players' psychology, but also an economic model; seeing as only thirty hectares were used and large amounts of areas were left in their natural state. Pete Dye certainly studied his classics.

Construction fever

The 1970s to the 1990s represented the baroque period with Desmond Muirhead, who demanded the right to make a golf course a work of art with out the obligatory rapport with nature,and this particular period also saw the advent of player-architects. Arnold Palmer and Gary Player, but primarily Jack Nicklaus,surrounded themselves with anonymous collaborators, who were the real architects. The promoters wanted signatures, to sell the houses built on the most beautiful pieces of land. The architects, players and landscapers became stars. As Tom Fazio observed, "There is a growing number of highly qualified and creative golf architects,and all the technology to build great golf courses. But we must spend time to avoid imitating past design work. Technology allows us to do many things we couldn't have imagined doing ten years ago." There are financial implications however. In 1960, 200 to 400,000 dollars was needed to build a course, today that figure is more like 3 to 8 million.

“The average player whose game ranges between 90 and 100 has to be taken into consideration as well as the professional player.”

This forward progression, in the direction of course length progressive race towards longer courses and astronomical budgets is beginning to ease off. These days the 'minimalists' make as few changes to the land as possible,some return to basics and even construct links courses in the middle of the countryside.

As golf courses are masterpieces that are constantly evolving, the architects also have to do some restructuring work in order to restore courses disfigured by the ravages of time or to breathe some life back into courses that do not generate much interest. Going back to Alister MacKenzie, "The advent of the golf architect has done much to increase the sporting and the dramatic element in golf.“The true test of the value of his work is its popularity and the rapid increase in members. One knows examples of the reconstruction of one or two short holes bringing in over 100 fresh members to a club which had been steadily diminishing in numbers.”

More than ever before the golf course architect has to be an artist,a technician and a financial administrator,managing the money provided by his clients and must be able to express his imagination even when money is tight. According to Tom Fazio, "You may wonder why you like a golf course.Why does it feel good? Is it just the beauty of the setting or something else? It is hard to pinpoint sometimes, but I believe part of the reason lies in the shape of a fairway as it traverses the landscape." It's down to the golf course architect to stir up these emotions.

From: EIGCA