The Seven Deadly Sins of Design

The first rule of golf course design is that there are no hard and fast rules, only principles by which the game is best played. The most famous principles were the 13 written by legendary designer Dr. Alister MacKenzie, on how to create the ‘ideal golf course’. MacKenzie’s commandments were more like ‘ideal world’ suggestions, and were elastic enough to have been broken by the great man himself countless times during an illustrious career.

In explaining his design doctrine in the book The Spirit of St Andrews, MacKenzie warns that a common mistake for designers, ‘is to follow prevailing fashions’ and therefore lose sight of the strategic values that underpin our great game. In the modern era, the seven deadly sins of golf course design relate mostly to this very trend, of architects building ‘modern’ courses and trying to keep pace with technology by creating holes that the average golfer cannot handle.

 

Sin 1 – Too long and too difficult

It was also Dr. MacKenzie back in the 1930s who wrote that, ‘it is an important thing in golf to make holes look much more difficult than they really are.’ With very few exceptions, golf’s best courses are relatively straightforward for the average amateur yet challenging for the professional looking to shoot a decent score. Sadly this important balance is often missing in modern design.

Technological advances have made it easier for elite players to bomb the ball outrageous distances. They have also made it easier for lazy course architects to add extra tee boxes and justify obscene lengths, penal hazards, narrow fairways and forced carries as necessary to test a modern golfer’s game. It’s no surprise that even strong, young PGA Tour stars love great old courses, and it would be a mistake for designers to ignore fun holes like short par threes and short par fours for the sake of length and difficulty.

 

Sin 2 – Too difficult to walk

Nothing interrupts the flow of a round more than a long walk between green and tee. Whether it’s strolling past a series of back plates or simply a disjointed routing with its holes spaced too far apart, this is one of those subliminal elements that can quickly turn people off a course.

Where possible, architects should aim to replicate the style of the golden age golf courses from the 1920s and 30s, where intimate routings transition easily from one hole to the other. Bill Coore has made a career out of building modern courses that feel old and historic, and he achieves much of his success by mimicking the intimacy of these transition areas. Like at Royal Melbourne and Kingston Heath, his holes tie together so naturally and so beautifully.

 

Sin 3 – Too expensive

One of the peculiarities of the golf business is the inverted correlation between cost and quality. More often than not, the less you spend on design and construction the better the end product will be. This has proven to be true all over the world, but especially in Australia over the past 30 years. The only thing expensive courses guarantee is expensive golf, and designers should always look to minimise build costs by maximising the use of natural site contours and conditions. They should also lose their fixation on championship length golf. Aside from being more fun to play, the other advantage of shorter courses is they are much cheaper to build and maintain.

 

Sin 4 –Too hard to maintain

Perhaps the greatest sin of modern design is building a course that your operators (client) can’t maintain. A small greens crew has no way of managing huge formal bunkers with complex edges along with the day-to-day maintenance required to keep tees, fairways, roughs and greens in order. The same is true of this modern trend toward more rugged bunkering. Native fescues growing out of bunkers is one thing, but the use of robust shrubs and aggressive ground cover to spruce up bunker faces has caused problems all across the country. It’s perfectly fine for designers to have a style preference, but they must ensure management can afford to sustain whatever features they build.

 

Sin 5 – Too many hazards and/or too much shaping

MacKenzie once wrote that most golfers ‘have an erroneous view of the real object of hazards. They look upon a hazard as a means of punishing a bad stroke, whereas their real object is to make the game more interesting.’ He added that most courses have too many bunkers, and that it was possible to make holes sufficiently interesting with one or two at the most. I’m not sure there is anything worse than a good hole spoilt by too much sand. A close second might be a course whose fairways were lined by containment mounds that were obviously artificial. We want to believe that golf is a game of man versus Mother Nature and symmetrical mounding, unsightly bunkers and inappropriately placed water hazards all conspire to destroy that illusion.

 

Sin 6 – Lack of originality

Every single golf site and every single golf project is different. So too should every single golf course. Australia has been blessed in recent times with the arrival of a number of really distinctive coastal courses, which have both elevated the game in this country but also damned those unremarkable layouts from the generation before, which were often indistinguishable from each other. Designers who can’t build great holes should at least offer golfers something new and unique. With the exception of places like Hope Island, Brookwater, The Dunes and Joondalup, it’s hard to remember such courses being built in the 1970s, 80s and 90s.

Some of the bigger design companies have a signature style, and actually work to ensure their courses all look the same, regardless of the virgin landscape. Thankfully Australia is a more mature market now, and such companies are no longer as busy as they once were.

 

Sin 7 – Lack of great holes

From a purist’s perspective, the biggest sin of golf course design is not building fantastic individual holes. There is no excuse. A hundred years ago CB Macdonald and Seth Raynor revolutionised golf in America, by building courses that featured replicas of the best holes from Europe and Great Britain. Raynor was a surveyor who never actually played golf. All he knew were the holes that Macdonald admired and had studied on his various trips abroad. Together they were responsible for a cluster of great designs, including The National Golf Links of America on Long Island, still regarded by many as the best course in that country.

In many instances, the template holes that Raynor and Macdonald built were improvements on the originals. Subsequently, dozens more terrific holes have been created by dozens more terrific architects. Today’s true golf course architect has never had a greater collection of holes upon which to draw inspiration.

Great holes exist on all landforms, and come in all shapes, sizes and lengths. Those course designers who can’t build something original should at least leave us something outstanding. At the risk of contradicting the points made in Sin 6, when given a flat 300 metre piece of land, for example, they would be much better off replicating Kingston Heath 3 or Riviera 10 than bunkering the life out of it or moving truckloads of dirt.

Darius Oliver, Architecture Editor

Back to News

More News