One of the most widespread but least well-known artistic disciplines in the world is golf course architecture. But given that the golf designer, more than any other artist, tries to replicate the earliest human vision of an earthly paradise, this oddly obscure profession can help shed light on popular culture, sociology, and even human nature itself.
Even so, in the middle of the 20th century, the same Bauhaus-influenced tastes that made post-World War II modernist architecture so tedious were swept aside, making even this most unfashionable of arts obsolete. The 1920s, when golf course architecture was at its height, are only recently starting to return.
A golf architecture enthusiast can frequently recognize a course’s designer from 35,000 feet, I know I can. Golf courses are among the few works of art that are easily visible from airplanes despite being hidden in plain sight. The 15,000 golf courses in America, assuming an average of a quarter square mile each, occupy almost as much space as Rhode Island and Delaware put together.
Golf architecture philosophy isn’t terribly elaborate compared to the thickets of theory that entangle most museum arts, but one thing all golf designers assert is that their courses look “natural.” I didn’t quite understand what was so natural about fairways of verdant, closely-mown grass growing up in arid Western Washington, though I still loved them. Here, the native landscape is impenetrable hillsides of evergreen trees.
Humans typically have two favorite landscapes, according to research conducted beginning in the 1980s. One is the place they spent their adolescence, but grassy parkland is almost always a child’s favorite before they become attached to their hometown’s appearance, and this affection endures into adulthood.
To create these pleasure grounds, top golf architects typically spend over $10 million per course, and because designers oversee the creation of multiple layouts simultaneously, a “signature” architect like A few billion dollars’ worth of golf courses will bear Tom Fazio’s name when his career is over.
Famous works of “environmental art,” such as Robert Smithson’s monumental earthwork “Spiral Jetty” in the Great Salt Lake is dwarfed by golf courses in terms of size and complexity.
Most golfers have historically viewed courses more in terms of their difficulty or length than their artistic merit. Despite recent advancements in golfers’ taste, many still assess a course more on how well the grass is maintained than on how well it is designed. In addition, despite the sport being fairly popular among young women in Scandinavia and East Asia, relatively few American women are interested in golf before menopause.
The golf industry has, however, developed a severe case of connoisseurship in recent years, publishing countless coffee-table books and calendars, and elevating long-forgotten early 20th-century designers like A.W. Tillinghast, Charles Blair MacDonald, and names of contemporary designers like Tom Doak and Pete Dye are brand names.
The first issue preventing golf course design from being recognized as fine art is the fact that to non-golfers, a course may seem as pointless as a Concerto for Dog Whistle. The idea that a golf course allows people to interact with interesting landscapes without harming wildlife makes sense in theory, but the obsession with golf courses won’t make much sense until you’ve driven a ball over a gaping canyon and onto the safe smoothness of the green.
The current big argument is between the established Fazio, the master of aesthetics who recently renovated Augusta, and challengers like the Ben Crenshaw-Bill Coore-Doak team, the expert on angles who created the gnarled and convoluted Pacific Dunes links in the Scottish tradition on the remote Oregon coast. While Doak’s perplexing holes defy golfers to determine which direction will work best, Fazio frames his forgiving holes so that novice players can immediately see the proper line.
Golf architecture is a relatively new field of study, so it’s reasonable to wish that one day we will witness a design prodigy who can perfectly blend beauty and cunning, just as Tiger Woods demonstrated that the best was yet to come among players.