Of Course

Then and Wow The past 30 years have seen course design evolve in four significant ways

We’ve returned to playability and the more organic roots of the game.

IT’S A COMMON SENTIMENT to believe things were better in the past—air travel, cinema, political discourse, french fries. In golf-course architecture, however, a conceit exists among designers, writers and ranking panelists that today’s best courses are functionally and artistically superior to those built from the 1950s into the 1990s. We’re in a “second Golden Age” of golf design, some say. ▶ Immodesty—and judgment—aside, there has been a distinct shift in tastes and architectural practices during the past 30 years. The catalyst was the opening of Sand Hills Golf Club in Nebraska in 1995. Scooped and seeded from relentless and rural sand dunes, the design was a breathtaking departure stylistically and philosophically from the architectural extravagance of the moment. ▶ Golf Digest’s annual Best New Courses lists illustrate the distinction between then and now. The 1989 private-course winner, Shadow Glen Golf Club in Kansas, is an archetype of formality refl ecting that era’s precise architectural intent and careful assemblage of features. Florida’s Streamsong Black, 2018’s Best New Public course, is heir to Sand Hills’ wild nonconformity and penchant for found, holistic (or holistic-appearing) holes. ▶ In the voyage from the age of industrialism to the age of illusion— of expressing construction grandly and expressing it barely at all—several core themes developed:

NATURALISM

If this is a golden age of anything, it’s the golden age of site selection. Developers have given architects breathtaking sites, often on sandy terrain or coastal dunes, inspiring naturalistic aesthetics. A contagious impulse ensued to make golf courses appear as extensions of the environment—an ideal that goes back more than 100 years but was replaced by pristine landscaping, artifi cial mounding and nontraditional materials like rock bulkheading—that’s even imported to locations that aren’t sandy, grassy or wind-blown.

WIDTH

The most important development from a playing perspective is the emphasis on width, rather than length. Destinations like Bandon Dunes reintroduced the modern game to the old spirit of playability and exploration and the need to “read” the golf hole. Today’s generous, open-source course design upends the dominant belief in the 1980s and ’90s that golf

▶ Contrast in styles: The precision of Golf Digest’s Best New private of 1989 (Shadow Glen, inset) versus the naturalism of Streamsong Black, 2018’s Best New public.

needed to be long, challenging and exacting to be taken seriously. That mentality still exists, but it looks increasingly limited compared to the joys of playing in space and fi nishing with the same ball.

DEFORESTATION

Trees have always been a cherished aspect of American golf, and they often enhance property values and playing experiences—until they don’t. Too many designs became infatuated with corridors of trees, often planted on arboreal binges, that suff ocate playing strategies and compromise turf condition. To unclog vistas, expand shot variety and improve sunlight and air circulation, tree removal is often now at the top of the list of any renovation. An affi nity for naked, open landscapes has increased accordingly. Bald, it turns out, is beautiful.

NEOCLASSICAL STRATEGY

“Classical,” in golf terms, is roughly the period from 1915-’30, the original Golden Age when architectural and strategic principles like the emphasis on shot angles, multiple lines of play, centralised bunkers and the use of ground and greens slope became indoctrinated. After generations of narrowing fairways and prescriptive setups, designers like Bill Coore, Tom Doak and Mike DeVries aggressively reasserted the importance of strategy into their products. The blending of these neoclassical concepts into the previous three principles has created what is now the prevailing design vernacular.

Trends have changed—and will continue to change—in more ways than these. But so far, the story of 21st-century architecture is how we’ve returned to playability and the more organic roots of the game. It’s hard to imagine that won’t age well.