1. I thought up GCaA two years ago because I believed my day job was on the line and I needed to start looking for other strings to my bow. That's no longer quite so imminent a prospect but even if it was, I have a different Plan B in mind now and I need to get to work on it.

2. For all we talk about the endless variety of golf courses, maybe it's just the endless variety of terrain that we have in mind. I've come to suspect there are only so many ways that a golf architect can defend three or four hundred yards of that terrain at a time and it certainly feels like there are only so many ways I can put his strategy into words without sounding repetitive.

3. There are some blogs you can write effectively just by turning your thoughts into print. With others, you're turning an hour or so's preliminary research into print and for a someone like me - a GCA 'hobbyist', as opposed to a careerist who can more readily churn out ideas - GCaA falls into the latter category. And I no longer have the time.

4. I shan't lie: not enough hits to counteract 1,2 and 3.

This is the second golf course architecture blog I've knocked on the head in a matter of months and as a professional writer, that pains me greatly, even if neither was anything more than a spare-time labour of love.

I don't doubt for a moment that I'll miss it and will second-guess this call on countless occasions but I know it's the right thing to do for now. The lamest blog entry around begins with the words "Sorry it's been so long since my last post..." and I'd rather be out of here than reduced to that.

To all but one of you who've spent time here, many thanks. To the Far Eastern peabrain who's spent almost a year unsuccessfully trying to spam GCaA with 'comments', meanwhile, go and Google 'Blogger spam filter' while kissing my rosy butt goodbye, you parasitic numbskull.

Feeling better already...

Normally, I might have been prepared to let this go as a creative one-off.

Peter Harradine wants to market himself as The Golfather, call himself 'The Don' and add appropriate music to his online advertising? Well, times are tough and sometimes those who dare to be different are those who survive.

But then I stumble across the backround jingle at Sanford Golf Design, where the line between golf architect and lounge lizard appears to have become somewhat blurred. Now I'm wondering if there's a trend forming.

Am I hearing the audio equivalent of the mid-life ponytail...?

If you think you may have heard a cry for help in the golf architecture trade, I'm...er...all ears.
 
[pic courtesy of milomingo]
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Wallpaper of the Day - Malaysia's Kuala Lumpur Golf and Country Club (West Course)

Image via WikipediaIts website comes to heel rather better in Google Chrome than in Firefox
 and we wait to see just how fragile the United Arab Emirates turns out to be in the current economic climate but these micro- and macro-quibbles apart, UAE Golf Online shows a lot of potential, as digital magazines go.

Two issues and a course guide for the region are all that's in the archive to date but there's a nice hole-of-the-month video feature that makes good use of the medium.

One to watch.
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Wallpaper of the Day - the great 'should courses go brown?' debate is a little bit last year on Australia's Mornington Peninsula...

Please note that this blog has now migrated to the blog at www.breakparblueprint.com/blog.

This post is featured here … http://breakparblueprint.com/blog/?p=147

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Please note that this blog has now migrated to the blog at www.breakparblueprint.com/blog.

This post is featured here … http://breakparblueprint.com/blog/?p=129

To gain immediate access to the break par blueprint course go to http://www.breakparblueprint.com/tjohnrichardson/bpb.html

Please note that this blog has now migrated to the blog at www.breakparblueprint.com/blog.

This post is featured here … http://breakparblueprint.com/blog/?p=125

To gain immediate access to the break par blueprint course go to http://www.breakparblueprint.com/tjohnrichardson/bpb.html

Please note that this blog has now migrated to the blog at www.breakparblueprint.com/blog.

This post is featured here … http://breakparblueprint.com/blog/?p=97

To gain immediate access to the break par blueprint course go to http://www.breakparblueprint.com/tjohnrichardson/bpb.html

Please note that this blog has now migrated to the blog at www.breakparblueprint.com/blog.

This post is featured here … http://breakparblueprint.com/blog/?p=32

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Armen Suny's blog always promised to be a little left-field. You don't call something Anarchist's Guide to Golf Course Architecture only to toe orthodoxy's line.

His latest post spells out in no uncertain terms, however, the behaviour that separates those who truly embrace the Muse from those who merely think they do. Most of it makes sense but some of it may well earn you some strange looks at dinner when you're asked how your day was...
"* See the course before the sun comes up, at sunrise, sunset, or after dark, in the moonlight...* Look at contours from shadows created by headlights, you won't believe what's there...* Watch the golf course during a wind storm, see what blows where...* Smell the dirt, good soils smell better than bad soils..."   And when you've done all this, don't forget that all-important debrief session back at the office.
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Wallpaper of the Day - Scotland's Kingsbarns Golf Links

A little academic credibility for one's favourite hobby never goes amiss, so it's good to hear of golf architecture being elevated to boffin status over at Hobart College:
"Associate Dean of Hobart College Chip Capraro is sharing his passion for golf by teaching a Reader's College, Golf Course Architecture: History and Theory, this semester. The course focuses on golf course history, architectural principles of design, and golf course architects themselves, utilizing a number of readings and two field trips"What a shame the idea has to be slightly tainted by easily the worst course design-linked jargon since 'bunkeralities':

"Capraro calls this method of study a 'triangulation pedagogy,' in which his students read current thinking and analysis, original writings by classic designers, and gain hands-on, experiential learning on the golf course"Some of you, of course, may remember triangulation pedagogy by its old name. 'Learning'.

That apart, sounds like a great way to get letters after your name and I wish Dean Capraro well. Certainly, the field study trips should knock your typical Roman ruins outing into a cocked hat:

• Mark Twain Golf Course 

• Green Lake State Park Golf Course: "just about my favorite Trent Jones golf course of all" - James Dodson, author, The Dewsweepers

If there's a more bewildering golf architecture-related musical segue out there right now, do let me know.

Comes about 44 seconds in...

So often I'd like to feature courses off golf's beaten track: so often I'm thwarted by websites that either don't exist or are merely rudimentary.

Which makes Lahore's Royal Palm Golf and Country Club such a welcome exception. Designed by Malaysian firm LDR Consultants, it features a daunting finish, the last seven holes all affected by water, but if you can forgive a few forced carries, it's a mature, nice-looking track.

The video below gives a flavour of the club and there is an extensive course gallery here. Hard to imagine that this is the same country so often represented as a hotbed of terrorism. Imran H Khan, indeed, paints a somewhat different picture.



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Pic of the Day - Michigan's Yarrow Golf Resort
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Image via WikipediaNo doubt Colligan Golf Design will do a fine job of renovating Dallas' Stevens Park Golf Club (flyover here: nice looking back nine, in particular)

Even if they were the hackers from hell, however, one thing they wouldn't be able to lay a finger on is the club's great claim to fame beyond the game of golf.

According to David R Holland's round-up of local munis, none other than Bonnie and Clyde used the Jack Burke track as a hideout when they were fleeing the Texas Rangers. Clyde's last resting place, indeed, is just a wedge away from the course, although whether these two facts are directly connected isn't revealed.

No mention of all this in the club's history, for some reason. Either the story's not true or Bonnie was there on a men-only day and it still rankles.
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Pic of the Day - Palm Springs' Desert Willow Golf Resort

They all laughed when Kevin Costner supposedly torpedoed his career by starring in Waterworld. Suddenly, it all seems rather prophetic.

They don't joke about a drowning planet over at Waterstudio, presumably. The Dutch company specialises in recreating the most unlikely architecture on floating islands - anything from mosques to car parks - and is now involved in plans to create the Maldives of the future - floating golf course included.

With the island nation seemingly doomed to be swamped by rising sea levels in the Indian Ocean, its leaders are implementing a strategy to delay the process and prepare alternatives should it happen. Part of this strategy involves a series of floating islands designed by Waterstudio's Koen Olthuis, to house facilities such as a convention centre and nine-hole golf course:

"the renderings for the amphibious mini-cities appear depict star-shaped, tiered islands with indoor spaces hidden under lush green-roof terraces, complete with interior pools and beaches"Get your passport ready Scott Miller, something tells me your name might be mentioned...

Image by Getty Images via DaylifeTaking it as read that Gary Player and his colleagues have found an environmentally-friendly way to keep the course at Abu Dhabi's Saadiyat Beach Golf Club moist, I congratulate him on a nice piece of work.

Clubhouse designer Frank Gehry may have to find his plaudits elsewhere, however.

I'm not sure quite what to make of the 18,000 square metre edifice. It's supposed to be finished in 2013, yet would World Architecture News run photos now if the exterior at least wasn't substantially as it's meant to be?

This is where we are with design now generally, it seems. The quest to push boundaries means many of us on the outside looking in are pressed to tell the difference between work in progress and the finished item.

So let's keep our fingers crossed and hope that 80 year old Frank has got another three years left in him and that there's still a way to go on that clubhouse profile. Because right now it looks like the London Olympics logo in 3D.

And that's not good.
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Pic of the Day - Arizona's Kierland Golf Club

I always think of that supposedly set-in-stone tenet, 'a golf course should look like it's been there forever', whenever I see a desert course.

And I smile.

Behold the new Gary Panks design at Conestoga Golf Club, Nevada, for example. Lush turf and arid, yellow rock. Together since the dawn of time...

And yet it's a contrast I still find irresistible, for reasons I can't begin to explain. If local feedback is to be believed, however, you may need to get in quick...

Image via WikipediaWhy does golf architecture's 'State of the Union' address succeed where its politicial counterpart tends to fail? Because Golf.com's John Garritty has chronicled something that sounds like it comes from the heart and not from a committee.

There are some hard-hitting sentiments expressed by those course designers whom Garritty has pressed for a view on where the trade now stands and yet while one must not make light of any situation that is costing people their livelihoods, there are clear hints that a better way could emerge from the current downturn.

"The day of the 800-unit master-planned community that features a sausage-link golf course routing, that's over"......................... "We'll just have to accept less-manicured courses," Engh says, adding, "I think that's fabulous. I like to see a little purple and brown in the grass"..........................
"Granted, Four Mile Ranch's fairways will be soggy after a storm, and you might not be able to use a golf cart for a day or two. But those are the kinds of concessions that Engh sees golf architects making in the next decade"..........................

"You can't rely on the 7,200-yard, par-72 golf course any more," says Hurdzan, who has long promoted responsible land management. "We should be looking at more 5,400-yard, family-style courses with six sets of tees"
I take it I'm not the only one who hasn't heard anything he doesn't like thus far?

Fazio-haters will pounce upon Tom's insistence that the latest generation of golf courses represents the best of times but he does know his way around the industry. That and my own knowledge of human fickleness means that I take very seriously his cautionary view of the Brave-New-Worlders: "Back in the seventies...there was an article...‘Let Your Course Grow Shaggy!' So we did that for a while. But all of a sudden we had growth and development, and everybody forgot about it"

It's Bobby Weed's observation that "golf architects have to get more involved in the financial and operational aspects of golf" that strikes me the most, however, for it coincided with my own increasing dismay as I read through the list of high-profile designers who are behind courses that have gone from being oases of green to elephants of white.

I don't care how blameless they are for the recession or whatever lack of foresight there may have been on the part of their business partners, it must surely sting the pride of men who invested serious time and effort in designing those tracks to see them reduced to hosting tumbleweed.

No developer should be either surprised or offended from now on if he finds his golf architect looking as closely at the nooks and crannies of the budget as he does at the contours of the site...
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Tricks of the Trade 101: design tips so clever, even I get them..

"The result is a course...that doesn't have a pricey infrastructure of ...subterranean drains. 'We didn't disturb the natural contours, so it drains naturally' "  - Jim Engh...............................................................................

Pic of the Day - 8th at The Ledges, Maine

Image by danperry.com via FlickrBad news about the proposed Golf Hole Hall of Fame: its debate-to-rancour decline will be measured in months rather than years.

Good news about the proposed Golf Hole Hall of Fame: golf courses neither bet nor take steroids. Two fewer things, at least, for folk to squabble over when induction time comes around.

It's a great idea and I wish it well. I just know that when golf architecture purists, self-appointed or otherwise, gather to discuss great holes, things can get real ugly...

You'll find it here. Memo to webmaster: under no circumstances open a forum...

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PGATour.com reports on the latest salvage of George Thomas' original thinking at Riviera; restoring the barranca that defines the split-fairway 8th.
"The intent of the modifications, directed by Fazio Golf Course Designers, was to restore the 1926 original design intent of George Thomas' "Double Fairway built around a dry wash." In 1939, the original design intent was lost to a strong flood that scoured the "dry wash" along with the right fairway.

Phase I of the restoration, in 2000, involved restoring the right fairway. Phase II involved restoring the dry wash barranca..."It made me realise just what a gem this course is, alongside the other courses on America's Major roster, so many of which are more exacting than exciting.

After the unusual opening tee shot, from an eyrie 70 feet above the fairway, comes Ben Hogan's choice for the greatest par three in America, the bunker-within-a-green 6th, the 8th, an architectural masterpiece at the 10th and, of course, that superb amphitheatre around the 18th green.

Enduring proof that greatness can embrace quirkiness.

Good on Riviera, too, for the nuggets of wisdom from the architect that preface several holes on the website course tour. More examples here.