Welcome back to another edition of the Frida Egg podcast and to the first installment of the School of Golf Architecture. I'll explain what that is in a minute, but first, this episode is brought to you by our friends at b Dratty. So a big priority for me is having golf clothes that I feel good about wearing both on and off the golf course. And I found that b drattypolos just hit that sweet spot exactly. I have their classic original liampolo in a few different colors, and it's
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School of Golf Architecture. I'll introduce the idea for this series in full once this episode gets underway, but basically, it's an introduction to golf course design, where I'm kind of standing in as the student heading out into the world and talking to some experts like today's guest Blake Conan, and just trying to learn as much as I can from them about this fascinating subject and delivering the results
to you. Today's episode is about the idea of place in golf architecture, and let's just get to it right.
It requires a different technique.
What you need to do is actually square the face so it'll dig down underneath that bad lie and propel that ball right out onto the green.
Here's the thing. Playing out of a buried line of bunker is completely different than playing out of a night and clean lion of green side buker.
You need to be aggressive on any show weather it's sitting cleanly for it.
Frida Egg, well, we've all faiked it.
Regretted Frida Egg not to be cleared though it's actually a pretty easy shot to hit. So a little backstory. Three years ago, Andy wrote a series for the Friday Egg website called Golf Course Architecture one oh one. There are really fun articles and a lot of people seem to enjoy them and find them helpful. So recently we've been brainstorming ways to update them or to revisit their
ideas from a different angle. Right on cue, we received a direct message on Twitter from the very smart Jamie Kennedy, who works for Golf TV. Basically, Jamie said, hey, you guys should do short episodes of the podcast explaining the basics of golf architecture, and right away we thought, yeah, we probably should, so thanks Jamie. From there, we came up with what we're going to call The School of
Golf Architecture. It'll be an occasional series and the installments will cover one top for twenty five to forty minutes. Each episode will include an interview with an expert, along with opening and closing thoughts. For me, they'll be more produced than the typical Frida Egg interview, but less produced than Frida Egg stories, and we're hoping that they'll be accessible enough for people who don't know much about golf architecture, but also offbeat and geeky enough for people who know
a lot. It's a balancing act, but I think we can pull it off. In addition to the audio, we'll be posting companion articles on the Friday Egg website. That cover the same topics, but with some visual accompaniment, so make sure to check those out as well. Usually, if you're giving an introduction to golf architecture, you begin with a discussion of land, soil types, climate, topography, location. These are definitely important things to understand, but I'm going to
start in a slightly different way. In this first episode. I'd like to talk about a related but somewhat separate concept and golf course design, the concept of place. You may think you know what a place is. Everyone knows what a place is, But when you really try to define it, or to distinguish it from space, that's where things get tricky. For now, though, let's keep it simple. We can define a place as a segment of space where life occurs. So golf courses, among other things, are places.
They're built and traversed by humans, and as a result, they take on a kind of identity or what we often call a sense of place. That phrase, a sense of place has grown a bit stale in contemporary usage. You'll see it in ads and travel brochures, but it's rooted in a notion that has been with us since ancient civilization. I'm talking about genius loci, which in Roman
mythology referred to the guardian spirit of a place. In the modern world, the term genius loci has evolved into a general way of describing a location's prevailing atmosphere, its unique feel, which is derived no not only from its sites and sounds and smells, but also from its community,
its history, and its everyday uses. Okay, so all of this might be starting to sound a little bit abstract and academic, but it's really just an attempt to put words to an experience that's instinctive, even visceral, and it's one that you're probably familiar with. Think of what it's like to go back to your childhood home, or to the main street in your college town, or even to the golf course where you learn the game. That feeling you get can be understood as your attachment to the
spirit of that place. How does all of this relate to golf architecture. Well, my favorite courses tend to be the ones that are especially good at cultivating those attachments between a golfer and the genius low Side. How they do this is far more art than science, but you know it when you feel it. Some of the courses where you feel it are highly ranked prairie dunes, sand Hills, Cyprus Point, while others are just local facilities that have
a true and lived in sense of place. May be exactly because they were built in simple ways Pacific Grove in California, or Grindstone Neck in Maine, or any number of home made links courses in Great Britain and Ireland. These courses may not excel in all of the criteria that we've grown accustomed to using when we assess golf architecture, but we need a vocabulary to talk about why they're so alluring. For me, that's the vocabulary of plays based design.
The term plays based design comes to us from the field of landscape architecture, but I found out about it from Blake Conan, a Nebraska based golf architect and builder who owns the firm Dundee Golf and has worked with Tom Doak and Todd Eckenrode. Here's how he puts it on his website. Plays Based design explores the connection between the natural and built environments and finds ways to integrate
the two together. It requires immersing oneself into the setting, studying its surrounding landforms, soil, existing vegetation, culture, community history to reveal the site's maximum potential. So to learn more about these ideas and generally about how the concept of place figures into golf architecture, I gave Bake a call. Here's that conversation. You know, I'm sure these concepts overlap, but what for you is the difference between a golf course's land and a golf course's place.
Well, the land just seems to be the physical attributes of it, right, like the site structure. So you're talking about you know, vegetation, topography, hydrology. You know, once you start defining it as a place, it's you take into more considerations of well, what's what's the built environment around there, what's you know, what's the culture, what's its history?
How is it different when you start to consider the human element of a piece of land, Because if that's the difference between a piece of land and a place, what are those things that you would look at beyond just the physical attributes of the land if you were assessing a site.
I think the first thing, even if it's not humans, if it's just animals that occupy it, you know, that could be a place and one of the cool things to start to look at is circulation and just how to humans or how to animals, how have they moved
around on this site before? I know, like Bill cor has talked about that a lot where he tries to find little rabbit tracks or sheep tracks to inform his routing, like, because if they've already figured out the easiest way to get around this place, then you know, that should certainly inform my decision of how I want the golf course
to function and circulate. And then you know, the built environment's a whole that adds another layer of complexity with people then living there and how do they use that space in daily life.
Part of what I'm thinking about right now, based on what you're saying, is how certain golf properties are not just completely natural. Sometimes they have the mark of human intervention in them. I'm thinking of sites like Chambers Bay, which used to be an old mine and elements of that are still incorporated into the design that's there, or at stream Song, where I believe the story is a bunch of people had already moved around the land there.
But instead of trying to deny that those human interventions happened, the designs of those two courses stream Song and Chambers Bay kind of embrace it. Is that something that you like to see in courses?
Yeah, absolutely, you know, And I think what that is is it's starting to embrace the historical, the history and the culture of the place, right how it was used, how people before you used it. So I think that's great to try to melt that with its new use, and particularly think of inventive ways to use that, like those big cement structures at Chambers Bay, you know, I think they're off the right of the eighteenth hole or
seventeenth hole, the railroad track that runs by it. You know, all that stuff adds character and then it also doesn't wipe out the previous history and culture of the place. Like an example that I'm sure everybody knows of on a golf course is an old quarry. Most golf architects throughout time, I think, have tried to utilize a quarry, and they're routing if one existed previously, whether it's having a tee or on it, or routing over it or
through it or in it. That is very much an idea that everybody wants to stick with and try to figure out a way to use because it's cool. It creates variety on the site, and it's doing exactly what we're talking about. You're respecting the previous history of what was there, even though it was man made or manipulated, trying to find a cool, unique use for it.
Let's go back a couple of steps here. Say you were looking at a property that had potential for golf. What would be your process for coming up with a set of characteristics of the place to respect as you were building the golf course.
I think a lot of that is spending time on
site and you know, doing your site analysis. If you're trying to learn more about the place, it ultimately means you've got to spend a little more time not only on site trying to find the cool things about it, the way the way water works, the way it reacts during storms, things like that, but then also what's the surrounding area, like what are the off site influences, Who are the people that have used this space before, what are the you know, the towns or the people around it.
Getting to know those areas.
Part of the process that you're proposing is not just being focused completely on the terrain, but also investigating the community and the history around the land, and I find that really interesting. How would you go about doing that? Would you look into archives, would you spend some time in the community itself, would you talk to people? Is that part of the site analysis process for you?
Yeah, certainly, I mean you would want to You would want to find as much history on the place as possible. You know, you could find out that two hundred years ago it served as something completely different. You know, there might have been like, say, a Civil War battle there and nobody knew, or it was like indigenous settlements, and then you can start rooting around in the woods and trying to find stuff that may inform your design. And
I think what that also does is helps you. It just helps you get attached to the place in a way of finding the more subtle details of it, and then you could figure out how to circulate around there as well.
Why do you think it's important to do that kind of work? How does it manifest itself in the final product of whatever you design?
How do you mean like the what's the outcome or from doing all that?
Yeah, what's what's the advantage? So you know, there's the option of just designing a golf course based on a topo map, in an office versus spending a ton of time on site doing a kind of ethnography even of the surrounding community and history. It just seems like a much more in depth process. What are the kind of fruits of that labor that you see as the golf course gets designed. What's the goal of going to that extra effort.
Yeah, I think the goal is to get all those little details right and at the at the end of the day, make it feel as much like the place that it is as you can. Once you start studying wind patterns, you figure out where areas one of a road, like where would a sand pattern actually get exposed on
that land? Are we actually putting in at a place where it's just going to go crazy and sand's gonna blow everywhere and this thing's gonna expand five times at size in a matter of three seasons, or is mother nature going to continually try to grasp that over So I think once you get to know more about the details of that stuff, how how mother nature wants to manipulate that place and how it wants to form that land, you know that can start to inform design decisions of
like bunkers facing southwest want to be flashed high and bunkers facing northeast need to be you know, tucked down low because the wind is going to do this. You could start to see weird landforms in areas that you weren't using for golf and incorporate them more into the site to try to give it that feel of the
place and accentuate that a little bit. I'm thinking of like at Memorial Park down in Houston, there was this cool ravine that Tom found and cleared out and routed the second hole a par three over, and the landforms in there were awesome, just because such steep land, you get such fast water moving through there, and then these tree routes basically have to grip onto the side of a steep slope and they create these weird little knobs
at formations. So I think Don and his crew were really informed by that when they were doing a lot of the ravine work, and we were informed by that when building holes near the ravine. It's like, well, we could sort of borrow from these landforms that have been covered up for fifty years and try to incorporate them into the golf and that helps sell the golf course as being a part of this place even.
More, and in that case, you were restoring the sense of place to a golf course that had perhaps over the past few decades lost.
It certainly, yeah, at least exposing what was lost exactly.
So a lot of what we're talking about philosophically is rooted in the concept of place based design, which comes from landscape architecture and has been practiced obviously in fields outside of golf architecture. So tell me a little more about the concept of place based design, where it comes from, how you learned about it, what it means to you.
So, place based design is sort of what we've been talking about. It's designing with and around characteristics that make a place special and unique. You know, not only the structure of the site, but the native ecosystem, the culture, just local experiences, and design decisions then reflect that analysis. The way I learned about place based design was in landscape architecture school. You start to study old landscape architects, and one that really caught my eye was a Danish
immigrant named Jens Jensen who was from Chicago. Came to Chicago in the early twentieth century, sort of on the heels of the First World's that Chicago had the Columbian Exposition. You know, classical architecture was all the rage, like the Beaux Arts French style of landscape architecture was really popular, really formalized landscape architecture. And this guy came in and was just sort of blown away by the diversity of the Illinois landscape, and he proposed this idea that design
should be harmonious with nature and its ecological processes. He wanted to sort of incorporate a place based design at a time when it was sort of unpopular. You know. Now he's responsible. He became the parks commissioner for Chicago, so he's responsible for all those small parks in the city that maybe Andy's familiar with. He's also responsible for identifying all the state parks, including the dunes parks. He found some really cool dunes land so he preserved those
and they've become state parks. So he just had he had this process as a landscape architect where he wanted to I've got his five points of his sort of five key points. He wanted to understand local culture, use native plants and local materials, create space and view, mingle light and shadow, and he preferred organic forms in large scale landscapes. I was like, well, a ton of that stuff is useful in golf course architecture as well.
What did some of this work look like in its finished form for the parks and the urban architecture and whatever he was doing.
I think a big park of his is Columbus Park in Chicago. One of the things that he was really known for in the way that he tried to create more of this play spased design. He would have these these circle pits where people could sit around, like communities could come together and have a space within the park to meet, which only then reinforce and emphasized this idea
of community. And then they very much. It was like, you've got lots of green space, You've got these organic shapes in the park, a variety of spaces and areas to do different activities, and then just being aware to always use native plants to reinforce this idea of here is what Illinois always has been, even though right now you're surrounded by a bunch of buildings and plethora built environment, like you can come to this park and all the stuff here is native to the place where you are,
so trying to maybe reconnect you to the land a little bit.
And so as you were learning about this kind of work in landscape architecture school, did a bell sort of go off for you at some point and you thought, hey, this is really what should be done in golf course architecture.
No it wasn't. I mean, it wasn't really a bell. It was just like, man, this is the term that people should be using, Like, minimalism is the term that was applied to this movement that Tom and Bill sort of started, right But to me, it's like, I also have an art background, and minimalism is not the best term for what that is. Minimalism is is it's like a highly purified form of art. It condenses it down to its essential elements, very little ornamentation, simple design. It's
often geometric and repetitive. So when I started learning more about plays based design, and you know, reading about Jens Jensen or Aldo Leopold or Robert Barvin or people like that, it's like, man, this is you know, it's not reinventing the wheel. It's just a better thing to describe the way people have been designing courses since the Golden Age.
If you think about it, a lot of the work that's called minimalism in golf architecture is really anything, but not just in the sense of the intervention in the landscape, but just in the in the style that you often see in these courses that are called minimalists. They're they're very kind of complex and filigreed and and have a concentration of detail.
You know, Minimalism may even be just that weird Victorian style where it's like there's a bunker one hundred and fifty yards, a cross bunker one hundred and fifty yards off the tee, three hundred yards off the tea, and then one right in front of the green. It's like, we never change that pattern. Everything's just repetitive and simple and very black and white, like if you do not
do this, then you will be penalized by this. And yeah, it's like once you started entering that variety and complexity and strategy into golf is when it changed. And so to me, it's like place based design encapsulates that perfectly.
Right, So, what are some ways in which you can make sure that the course you're building is respecting the spirit of the place that it sits in.
I think it's what a lot of people who are good at routing golf courses and designing golf courses. Do you know you're trying to provide variety, You're trying to start to play with how people interact with that space. You're respecting the natural hydrology, so you're not you know, you're not just putting a green anywhere and then building a bunch of catch basins around it, because you're just saying,
screw it to the natural hydrology. It's like you're working with the land in a way that it can function as it always has, but then still just be used for this fun little game we like to play.
And to come at this from a different direction, What are some ways in which golf architecture can violate a sense of place?
My main one has always been Shadow Creek in Las Vegas,
just because it's so not of desert golf. It's basically like somebody took a helicopter and imported parkland golf of like even some weird form of southwestern mountain golf into it, you know, And ultimately what that does is it's going to drive up maintenance costs in the long run, like if nothing else, and only thinking of it economically, like it's just going to be so much more to maintain every year if you're constantly trying to put a square
peg in a round hole. You know, if you're if you're starting to work with the place and appreciate what that place is and designing around it, it's going to be much more. It's going to be much easier to maintain.
You know. One of the things, it's like, I really enjoyed Kingsbarns, and I think the golf there is excellent and the way that the golf holes play, But to me, that's a place where it's like several of those holes we're just on pretty flat ag land, not even gently rolling, and so trying to create a links theesetic throughout in top soil just didn't work for me as far as
creating a sense of place. It just like it's always felt a little weird to me because of that, where I think maybe let the three or four links holes they have down near the water be the Lynx holes, and then you could try to do something different that
nobody's really executed before on that ag land. Not to say you need to do it in a McDonald or Rainer style, but I think coming at it from a point of view of like, you know what, we're not going to try to just blow everything up and recreate these full links because the Scots aren't gonna buy it. It's not believable in that place, and it also doesn't speak to what that land was before.
You've seen that in a few recent high profile Scottish courses in fact, where the design isn't exactly corresponding to what the place was because some of the new properties that are available are not your classic dunesland properties.
Yeah, you can't and it's like I get it, the SSSI. You can't build on links anymore. And they're the hardest thing to recreate because they've just weathered through wind and waves and nature for thousands or millions of years and formed these cool, delicate little rimples. It's like it's sort of impossible to recreate. And that's why the Links courses are so good. It's because they were, you know, divinely created. The hand of man isn't good enough to recreate that stuff.
So I would almost want to approach it from a completely different way and try to give the scott something that they've never had before, rather than constantly trying to recreate links land that I know, I'm not going to recreate it, as well as the four links courses that are within a twenty mile drive of them.
Yeah, are there circumstances in which you think it's proper or or advisable even to leave behind a certain properties spirit of place to kick out its genius lows? I say, you see you later. We're going to try to create something new here. We're going to try to create a rich, artificial environment that has its own spirit of place, that is made by the hand of man. Some who like
Shadow Creek would say that's exactly what it does. It took an incredibly unpromising property for golf right flat desert basically and built an entirely new environment out of nothing. Now, I guess the question is whether you like that environment or not, or think it's responsible or not to take on that kind of project. But you know, do you think there are circumstances in which that sort of approach is the best approach?
Yeah? Absolutely. You know there are a number of examples where a designer or an architect has taken a crummy piece of land and done something pretty cool with it, like Trinity Forest. You know, you wouldn't want to preserve the sense of place there that it was a landfill. You may want to look to what the land was before it was even a landfill and see if there's some cool historical significance that you could try to recapture
or bring back. Modern design and modern equipment has definitely given people the option to take worse piece of worse pieces of land and do something cool with them. You know, I still disagree that you needed to put pine trees in the desert it you probably could have met somebody halfway with it, made a cool like desert landscape golf course.
Shadow Barancas instead of Shadow Creek.
Yeah, exactly. So I still I still disagree with that place. But I also like, I'm young, and I'm an idiot, and I've never done it before, so I also understand that there's still a lot more to learn as well. And the ability to manipulate a site in a way that can give people an interesting golf course to play is is cool.
You know.
It's like the more the more we can just try to compromise on that. I think it's like, yeah, you might have to do something with a dead, fat piece of land, like like Tom at the Rawles course. In Texas to make it interesting and to provide the game of golf to that college in that town. That's great. You wouldn't want to take that away.
I mean, it takes a tremendous amount of skill to build something that is not inherent to the landscape. I mean, it takes a lot of skill to build a course that respects the landscape as well and is place based in its approach. But if you're going to create something artificial in order to make it good and compelling, you really have to have mastery, right, and you really have to have artistic ability. And when I look at a
course like the ones that Mike Strants built. A lot of those courses, including NPCC Shore, which is in a beautiful place. I don't know if the property is all that amazing, especially compared to what's just down the road, but that course doesn't really feel like Monterey necessarily. It is something different. But I find it udibly interesting to look at. And part of that, I think is that Strants was a boundary pushing artist as well as a
golf architect. And what he did there, what he created there, the artificial elements there are compelling and have their own kind of sense of place, even if it isn't the original spirit of that landscape. Can you think of any examples like that that you've seen of courses that are able to pull off that feet.
Yeah, I mean I think NBC is a good example. And you bring up Mike Strands, and the thing that's so cool about him is how intentional he was. I think if you don't have something great to work with, or if your neighbors are Pebble Beach and Cypress Point, maybe you've got a little bit more of a chip on your shoulder to try to differentiate yourself. But it's that idea of being intentional rather than, you know, trying
to recreate the dunes. I'm not going to be able to do it as well as Cypress Point does it naturally. So it's like I'll just be very intentional that instead of trying to honor what this place was, I'm just going to make myself a part of its story. And that is very cool as well. You know, I think National Golf Links moved a ton of earth when they were constructing, and a lot of things about it are very intentional and they're not trying to hide it either.
So I think that's where you start to see that compromise come in.
Yeah. All right, So just to wrap things up here, we've mentioned a few courses as examples so far, but what are some golf courses that really come to mind when you think of plays based design done well?
You know, it's not coincidentally. I think it's a lot of the great golf courses in the world are center around this idea of plays based design. Whether they knew anything about that concept or had thought about it, they just worked in a way that was consistent with the ideas that we've basically described. Now, places like Cyprus Point or National Golf Links or Royal Melbourne or sand Hills,
you know, they're all sort of of their place. And I guess I'm I'm sort of limiting that to golf courses that were built by man because so many of the Link's golf courses, probably all of them are just there. They're naturally of their place because they the most design input that was put into a lot of them were just the locals gathering around and agreeing on the number of holes to play or which route to play them, you know, maybe doing a little tweak to agree here there,
or making sure a bunker stays the same. But it's like, for the most part, links courses are all of their place, and it's why they're so interesting to study to this day because they were designed five hundred years ago by mother Nature. Yet through all the advances and technology, they've
still lasted the test of time. You know, we've done a good job in the United States since guys like McDonald and Travis and Herbert Leeds, all these old great amateur golfers were informed by the principles of links courses and then just became good at executing them on the pieces of land that we had in the United States. Pine Valley is another great one. Something like Somerset Hills is very much just of the place.
Yeah, even though Somerset Hills has some of those what people would consider artificial shapes on it.
Yeah, exactly, it's like there's old grassover roads going through there. You know. Garden City is the same way, where it's like there's a lot of these intentional design features, but you're very much using what the place was and incorporating that indie your design, Like, well, we're not going to take the time to fill in this road, Let's just make the road a cross hazard for this hole and we'll call it good.
Yeah. Yeah, I mean allied to this concept of plays based design is the idea of vernacular architecture, and I think that's part of what you were talking about before, with links courses designed by their communities, essentially by amateur designers that have a true and lived in spirit of place because they were built locally, using local materials i e. The land, and not doing much to it.
And that's what I want to go. I want to continue always to go over to the British Isles and study the Links courses over there. But I'm also sort of curious about this idea that the nature of the people in these different towns gave a different character to the golf course. So, you know, we're the hardened people of Northern Scotland. Were they creating, you know, more difficult courses and they would go to the pub every night and they would have a beer and figure out a
way to be more masochistic. And then while some people in Ireland maybe they're more witty or clever or playful group and so they create more playful routings. I think that's part of the reason why, like learning about the people and learning about the culture is interesting. You can sort of get to know who these people are and what place they are, and place obviously informs who people are, so just always trying to connect those things and study them.
I think it would be interesting for links courses because you know, Robert Hunter, I was just I just got done reading the links for that golf Club Atlist book Club, and it was interesting because he talked about the ability to identify players who are from different links courses just by the way they played golf. He said, guys who came from Sandwich always produced good drivers of the ball. Guys who played at Saint Andrews were always great at
the pitch and run. Prestwick players had light hands for delicate pitches. Deal players were excellent putters from off the green. Like it's so interesting that they could play in a competition at one course and be like, oh, that guy must be from Deal because he's always got good weights on it, good weight on his putts from off the green. It's like stuff like that just interests me and that speaks more to the place than anything. Really.
Yeah, that's localism, right, which is something that's been lost in a big way since the early days of golf in the mid nineteen hundreds, I mean sorry, in the mid eighteen hundreds through the early nineteen hundreds, the world was so much more local than it is now and part of the result of increased transportation and communication globalization. All that stuff is a kind of standardization of a lot of things, including it sounds like golf and golf courses.
Yeah, I think you hit the nail on the head too. Like place based design just just helps you stay away from any standardization. You want it to be as unique as it possibly can be and be of that place. And it's like, you're right. The more connected we become, the more standardized everything everything becomes, and you don't want one hundred years from now, every golf course to play the same way.
I really liked where Blake and I got at the end of that conversation. Basically, what he helped me realize was that golfer can texture could be a kind of countercultural force in the modern world. What I mean by that is, you know, in the twentieth century, building design and urban planning became more standardized. We've gotten away from the vernacular architecture of earlier periods of history, where local materials and local modes of construction were all that was
available to most communities. The result is that what we build today tends to function more predictably and more safely, but it often lacks a local and distinctive sense of place. Just think of like malls in big box stores. Those look and feel more or less the same whether they're in Maine or New Mexico. So golf courses could serve as a contrast to those kinds of places, especially if
they're designed with a place based approach. They could remind people of the indigenous terrain of a region, like Jens Jensen's parks do in Chicago, or they could just feel unique. They could provide a break in the sameness of most urban and suburban landscapes. That's a powerful thing that golf courses can do, and that some older, more vernacular courses do without even really trying. So I'm a fan of play based design, not only as a practice, but also
as a piece of vocabulary. I think it is, as Blake said, a better and more accurate way of describing what we've been calling minimalism in golf architecture. I also like that it's borrowed from another field, even if it's an overlapping field. In landscape architecture, golf can be pretty insular, so it's encouraging to see a young designer like Blake
drawing inspiration from other disciplines. Now, the way I'll usually wrap up these School of Golf Architecture episodes is by teasing out a question that the interview encouraged me to think more about. For this one, it's whether or to what extent place based design can be artificial. I think I'd hold to my position that it can be, but the architect had better be really good, really artistics persuasive.
I mentioned Mike Strants as a designer who gave artificial environments their own senses of place, but Pete Die at his best could do that as well. The fact remains, though, that for me, a course that sits lightly on a great property and derives its sense of place from the natural environment that's tough to be. Conversely, the courses that don't resonate with me tend to be the ones that are artificial and that fail to do anything super interesting
with their artificiality. And I think that's because, again, just for me, it's very rare that an architect can compete with mother nature. But of course i'd love to know what you think. You can find me on Twitter at g Ford Golf and the general Frida Egg account at the frieda Egg with underscores between each word. Let's keep the discussion going