Speaker 1: Welcome back to another edition of the Frida Egg podcast
Speaker 1: and to Part three of the School of Golf Architecture.
Speaker 1: Today's episode is brought to you by our friends at
Speaker 1: b Dradty. Bdratty dot com has a fantastic range of handsome, comfortable,
Speaker 1: incredibly well made clothing. I'd particularly recommend the long sleeve
Speaker 1: Willie Crewe neeck Tee, which is ideal for lounging around
Speaker 1: the house as well as taking a brisk morning walk
Speaker 1: as well as going for a grocery run, basically all
Speaker 1: the things we're doing today. It's just really really comfortable
Speaker 1: and it looks sharp, so it can adapt to all
Speaker 1: sorts of different situations. So go to bdradty dot com
Speaker 1: and use our exclusive promo code TFE twenty five that's
Speaker 1: TFE two five and get twenty five percent off your purchase.
Speaker 1: You can use the same promo code at the Zero
Speaker 1: Restriction website. If you enjoy what we're doing here at
Speaker 1: the Frida Egg, this is a great way to support us.
Speaker 1: All Right. School of Architecture Part three. My tutor today
Speaker 1: is Riley John's and our topic is tie ins, or
Speaker 1: the craft of melding a golf course with its surroundings.
Speaker 1: It was really fun talking to Riley, who's one of
Speaker 1: the brightest minds in golf architecture today. So let's just
Speaker 1: get to it.
Speaker 2: Frida Egg requires a different technique. What you need to
Speaker 2: do is actually square the face so it'll dig down
Speaker 2: underneath that bad line and propel that ball right out
Speaker 2: onto the green.
Speaker 3: Here's the thing.
Speaker 2: Playing out of a buried lion of bunker is completely
Speaker 2: different than playing out of a night clean lion of
Speaker 2: greenside bunker.
Speaker 3: You need to be aggressive on any show, whether it's
Speaker 3: sitting cleanly for its Friday Egg. Well, we've all faithd it,
Speaker 3: the dreaded Frida Egg.
Speaker 1: It's not to be feared.
Speaker 3: Though it's actually a pretty easy shot to hit.
Speaker 1: It takes a lot of effort to appear effortless. How
Speaker 1: that old chestnut applies to golf course design is our
Speaker 1: subject in this edition of the School of Golf Architecture.
Speaker 1: When I started building this series, I didn't exactly have
Speaker 1: a plan. It's like I'm playing with a set of
Speaker 1: old school legos, just connecting one piece at a time
Speaker 1: and hoping that I'll end up with something cool. But
Speaker 1: looking back, I realized that the first three installments actually
Speaker 1: concentrate on the same theme, the relationship between a golf
Speaker 1: course and its setting. First, I talked to Blake Conan
Speaker 1: about Place. Next, I spoke with George Waters about Linksland
Speaker 1: and today Riley Johns and I zero in on the
Speaker 1: spot where a golf course and its environment meet. Architects
Speaker 1: and shapers do a lot of work there. The goal
Speaker 1: is usually to create tie ins or features that mediate
Speaker 1: between new man made forms and pre existing ones on
Speaker 1: a completely natural golf course. If such a thing exists,
Speaker 1: tians would not be necessary. The holes would already be
Speaker 1: tied in. They would be no different from the land itself.
Speaker 1: But the more that golf course builders alter the terrain,
Speaker 1: the tougher it is to reunite the holes with their surroundings. Today,
Speaker 1: tians have become especially important in golf course construction. Modern architects,
Speaker 1: even ones known to revere the lay of the land,
Speaker 1: move a great deal of earth. At the same time,
Speaker 1: more and more clients are asking for courses that appear
Speaker 1: at home in their environments. Give me another sand hills,
Speaker 1: another Pacific dunes. So if you spend any time around
Speaker 1: today's golf course builders, you will hear them talk about
Speaker 1: tians frequently to outsiders, though it's a somewhat mysterious topic.
Speaker 1: What exactly do tians look like? How do you make them?
Speaker 1: What are they supposed to do? To learn more, I
Speaker 1: reached out to Riley John's. Riley has helped build well
Speaker 1: some of the twenty first century's most harmonious golfing grounds
Speaker 1: with Bill Kore and Bank Crenshaw, Tom Doak, Jim Orbina,
Speaker 1: and Rod Whitman. In twenty thirteen he founded Integrative Golf Design,
Speaker 1: and in twenty sixteen he and Keith reb renovated the
Speaker 1: municipal Winter Park nine in Florida. That course now meshes
Speaker 1: with its community in a mutually beneficial, mutually beautifying way.
Speaker 1: More recently, Riley and Keith designed a ten hole short
Speaker 1: course at Forest Dunes and began a restoration of William
Speaker 1: Flynn's Rolling Green. Earlier this week, Riley snuck out to
Speaker 1: his office in downtown Canmore, Canada to let me in
Speaker 1: on the secrets of the tie in. Just in the
Speaker 1: simplest terms, what is a tie in? How would you
Speaker 1: define it?
Speaker 3: I would define a tie in as it's where the
Speaker 3: manufactured meets the natural or meets its surrounds its immediate
Speaker 3: surrounds its, you know, the that's a time the act
Speaker 3: of tying in is more of the intentional blending or
Speaker 3: adaptation of one's work with the immediate surrounds. So there's kind
Speaker 3: of a an interplay on the two. You know, golf
Speaker 3: we would we would simply just say fitting the hole
Speaker 3: into place.
Speaker 1: And are there different types of tie ins? Are there?
Speaker 1: Like categories?
Speaker 3: The one that jumps to mine right out of the gate,
Speaker 3: which which would be the obvious one would be a
Speaker 3: physical tie and that would be you know, connecting top
Speaker 3: graphical elevations or grades, landforms, mimicking landforms, grassing lines. You
Speaker 3: can tie those two together. But yeah, I would say
Speaker 3: there's different kinds of tians. I would say you could have,
Speaker 3: you know, you have their physical, environmental and visual tie ins.
Speaker 3: Visual times is a big one for golf course design.
Speaker 3: But you could have a cultural tie in, a historical
Speaker 3: tie in, a spiritual tie And I listened to the
Speaker 3: podcast you did with Blake and you guys were talking
Speaker 3: about space and place. You know, there's a similarity there.
Speaker 3: You could you could almost say that that discussion you
Speaker 3: were talking about cultural and historical times. You know, you
Speaker 3: could say, like a historical tie in would be the
Speaker 3: old course at Saint Andrew's and the built environment the town,
Speaker 3: the structures, the steeples of the buildings and the streets
Speaker 3: and that and that part of the property, and tying
Speaker 3: that not just visually in but from a from a
Speaker 3: historical point of view. You know that as you approached
Speaker 3: the town on your bat and the way back in, uh,
Speaker 3: you know you're walking in the same footsteps that historically
Speaker 3: every great golfer that's ever walked the earth has done.
Speaker 1: I'm curious about all those categories that you just went over,
Speaker 1: but maybe we can start with the physical or the visual.
Speaker 1: It sounds like you would draw a distinction between physical
Speaker 1: and visual. What what would that distinction be between the
Speaker 1: physical and a visual tie in?
Speaker 3: Well, a visual would be background, right, the backdrop of
Speaker 3: a golf hole. Horizon lines are critical. We work really
Speaker 3: hard on making sure our horizon lines don't clash with
Speaker 3: the inherent horizon lines of the backdrop. Either. You want
Speaker 3: to accent views, focus views, or even obscure views, but
Speaker 3: it's all about framing the picture. An environmental tie in,
Speaker 3: which would be a bit more of like vegetation, we
Speaker 3: would work really hard on making sure that the color
Speaker 3: and the texture and the composition of how the native
Speaker 3: landscapes and textures and colors integrate with the turf and
Speaker 3: the golf components. But typically the three go hand in
Speaker 3: hand in unison, and they're not mutually exclusive either. So physical, environmental,
Speaker 3: and visual. You're kind of tying those three things together
Speaker 3: all the time when you're creating a golf hole.
Speaker 1: So what is the importance of that kind of work?
Speaker 1: What is the importance of making that interface particularly hidden
Speaker 1: or graceful in some way, or artful to the golfer's experience.
Speaker 3: Well, I think, first of all, humans inherently find landscapes
Speaker 3: that are easy on the eyes, look effortless. We find
Speaker 3: those pleasing. It's a human nature. I don't know, you'd
Speaker 3: have to talk to a psychologist about why, but I
Speaker 3: think I think the importance of times is both visual
Speaker 3: and from an aesthetic perspective, but also functional. You know, visually,
Speaker 3: Italians helped kind of conceal the work that has taken
Speaker 3: place and properly tied in. Landscapes are easy on the eyes.
Speaker 3: They should appear effortless and seamless if done properly. No
Speaker 3: one will ever comment on how good your tians are
Speaker 3: because they won't know they don't exist, right, they should
Speaker 3: just they should just be non existent, is the idea
Speaker 3: behind them. But if poorly done, you know that disconnection
Speaker 3: will be forever. It'll be baked into design forever. You know,
Speaker 3: A good a good tie in makes your work difficult
Speaker 3: to distinguish where you started and where you ended with
Speaker 3: the project. You know, it kind of completes the entire
Speaker 3: landscape picture, and it makes it look more plausible as
Speaker 3: if nature herself created it, you know, or you found
Speaker 3: it yourself. Right, You're kind of always trying to emulate
Speaker 3: and mimic nature, and the tie ins is a very
Speaker 3: critical part in doing that. You know, functionally, tying is
Speaker 3: very important because you know, a thoughtful kient allows the
Speaker 3: landscape to function as it did prior to your alterations.
Speaker 3: George C. Thomas had a great quote where he said
Speaker 3: in golf Course, construction, art and utility meet both are
Speaker 3: absolutely one is absolutely ruined without the other. And I
Speaker 3: think he's kind of talking to the idea of the
Speaker 3: functional component of times with your work. For instance, if
Speaker 3: you have a natural swale that intersects a proposed golf
Speaker 3: hole that you're going to build. It's an inherent feature
Speaker 3: of the landscape, and your job is to riff off
Speaker 3: of it, to play off of it, to utilize it,
Speaker 3: and to be inspired by it. And by mimicking that
Speaker 3: swale in the golf hole, you're maintaining its relationship with
Speaker 3: the golf hole. If you filled in the swale or
Speaker 3: if you blocked or damned that swale prior to it's
Speaker 3: a coming into the golf hole and exiting the golf hole.
Speaker 3: You know, that would be considered a poor tying because
Speaker 3: it's all of a sudden contrived, it's unnatural. And not
Speaker 3: only that, you're blocking the functionality of it, which is
Speaker 3: a conduit for water potentially and creating an issue, and
Speaker 3: so all of a sudden things become unbalanced, right, And
Speaker 3: so's that's where I think the importance of a tie is.
Speaker 3: It's both in a visual anesthetic but also a functionality
Speaker 3: component to it.
Speaker 1: Can you remember a hole that you worked on, or
Speaker 1: even an entire course that you worked on where the
Speaker 1: high ends were particularly challenging.
Speaker 3: Any course that where the natural lay of the land
Speaker 3: is so stunning and so distinct and so beautiful. It's
Speaker 3: hard to recreate that just do the nature of the
Speaker 3: construction process, you end up destroying a lot of it.
Speaker 3: You try not to, but you know, sometimes you need
Speaker 3: a whole road to access an area for materials, or
Speaker 3: you know, whatever the situation may be. Sometimes you have
Speaker 3: to massage shapes into the land scape to fit a
Speaker 3: green or tea or bunker, what have you. And so
Speaker 3: the idea is, after this destruction of the natural landscape,
Speaker 3: how do we reconstruct it? How do we put humpty
Speaker 3: dumpty back together again? So that's that's the hardest part.
Speaker 3: When you have and already inherently complex rich textures, colors,
Speaker 3: you know, a landscape that's evolved in that particular spot
Speaker 3: to its microclimate over one hundred years. You can't necessarily
Speaker 3: create that in a month. But you know, an example
Speaker 3: that jumps out to me is when we were working
Speaker 3: at Cabot Cliffs and a whole two there was a
Speaker 3: big hillside that was covered in trees, and the process
Speaker 3: of removing and grubbing those trees essentially denude and just
Speaker 3: destroyed that hillside. And so we had to figure out
Speaker 3: how to shape some tea's in there, but then tie
Speaker 3: it back into the natural looking dune scape. And so
Speaker 3: what we did was we took sand, the native sand,
Speaker 3: some merrim grass, some logs, some wood, some brushes, some brush,
Speaker 3: some different native vegetation. We call it chunking, where you
Speaker 3: take scoops of native material from elsewhere on site and
Speaker 3: you replace it places that you've worked, or you plug
Speaker 3: it into places where you've worked, give it the most
Speaker 3: visual impact. It'll eventually grow in and spread and propagate itself.
Speaker 3: So what we had to do is essentially create a
Speaker 3: massive faux dune to conceal the work we had to
Speaker 3: do in order to build two teas at Caba Cliffs,
Speaker 3: and so it took a lot of We had two excavators.
Speaker 3: We had to flip sand up to the other. Exec
Speaker 3: that's how high of a hill this was, right, there
Speaker 3: was no sand on it, and we had to create
Speaker 3: what we then called frankin dune. It we were waiting
Speaker 3: for a lightning strike and it was going to come alive.
Speaker 3: We choke them the idea and then we let the
Speaker 3: wind hit it. We let the natural element start to
Speaker 3: kind of do their thing, and we created a fake
Speaker 3: giant dune to hide the work that had to go
Speaker 3: on in order to build the teas at Cabacliffs. That's
Speaker 3: that's an example, an extreme example of us playing off
Speaker 3: the natural surrounds and trying to bridge and connect the
Speaker 3: gap between what we had to create and what was existing.
Speaker 3: And we had to choose what element that was going
Speaker 3: to be because we could have done you could do
Speaker 3: anything right. You could you could replant trees, you could
Speaker 3: just hide your seatd with some fescu grass. You could
Speaker 3: just let it be and see what native plants re emerge.
Speaker 3: And so you have to make those decisions on what's
Speaker 3: your theme, what's your inspiration, and then go for it
Speaker 3: and create it. I mean, you know we're faking nature.
Speaker 1: Yeah, the nature fakers. Yeah, that's such a great story.
Speaker 1: And part of what strikes me about it is that
Speaker 1: you built this landform, this dune, and it's very hard
Speaker 1: to build dunes that look valid, right, right, We've all
Speaker 1: seen courses where there are these kind of faux dunes
Speaker 1: that just look like normal containment mounds and they don't
Speaker 1: look very cool, and they disrupt the tie in of
Speaker 1: the course throughout. So you built this dune, But towards
Speaker 1: the end of the process, it seems like this was
Speaker 1: a key part of the process, you allowed nature to
Speaker 1: go to work on the feature. You didn't fix it
Speaker 1: in place. You allowed wind and the elements to shape
Speaker 1: the form that you made, so that presumably it started
Speaker 1: to look a little bit more like what was around it.
Speaker 1: Do I have that right?
Speaker 3: That's exactly it. You have to let nature have her
Speaker 3: hand in it, because she's the one, She's the ultimate
Speaker 3: artist at the end of the day, right, So we
Speaker 3: just try to get the elements in place, the materials
Speaker 3: in place, set it up. That works for our purpose,
Speaker 3: which is golf. But at the end of the day,
Speaker 3: mother Nature is going to take over anyway and do
Speaker 3: her thing. And you know, nature is destruction. It is random,
Speaker 3: it is chaotic. So if we're in there trying to
Speaker 3: beautifully place what in our human mind we think is
Speaker 3: the ideal bunker, while we're missing the whole purpose of it.
Speaker 3: Sometimes creative chaos is your best approach to mimicking nature.
Speaker 1: So Cabot Cliffs is obviously this spectacular, huge scale landscape
Speaker 1: with all sorts of natural gifts as well as natural
Speaker 1: challenges to the construction of a golf course. But it's
Speaker 1: big and it's spectacular. Maybe we could talk about your
Speaker 1: approach to tie ins at a very different property in
Speaker 1: winter Park, where you had a city course that kind
Speaker 1: of winds through a neighborhood is more or less flat.
Speaker 1: So when you were rebuilding features there, rebuilding the greens,
Speaker 1: building new bunkers, rebuilding bunkers, how did you think about
Speaker 1: tying in the course to its surroundings Because they weren't
Speaker 1: all natural surrounding, right they were. There's a lot of
Speaker 1: neighborhood there. Did you think about tying the course into that?
Speaker 3: Well, that's that's all we had, right, There was no nature,
Speaker 3: natural environmental bounty of colors and textures and landscape. It was.
Speaker 3: It was human built form. We had to tie in
Speaker 3: with city infrastructure, you know, physically, we had to tie
Speaker 3: in the city infrastructure, whether that be an electrical transformer box,
Speaker 3: the sidewalk, the street curb, the drip line of existing
Speaker 3: trees that were to remain historic trees, you know. So
Speaker 3: that was the physical tie in, which certainly was a
Speaker 3: lot different. Typically, you would love to be able to
Speaker 3: draw out or string out your tie in. The tighter
Speaker 3: of a box that you're placed in, the more difficult
Speaker 3: it is to tie in, whereas if you're on an
Speaker 3: eighteen hole golf course, like Capaclish is something you can
Speaker 3: literally tie in something, you know, for thirty yards if
Speaker 3: you need to winter Park. We did not have that
Speaker 3: luxury because we were bound by the street corners and
Speaker 3: the curbs and the shape of the of the blocks
Speaker 3: of the street. So there was certainly a different tie
Speaker 3: in in our constraints were given to us. We weren't
Speaker 3: able to knock down a curb or move a sidewalk
Speaker 3: or change things significantly. So our only tie ins that
Speaker 3: we could could do other than tying in physically to
Speaker 3: the streetscape was visual corridors. Was experiential tie ins was
Speaker 3: community and culture, and those things we kind of discussed before.
Speaker 3: We wanted to open up different views to structures, whether
Speaker 3: that the church or the grave, you know, the cemetery,
Speaker 3: the main street, to people walking on the street, on
Speaker 3: the on the sidewalk, to also open up the viewing
Speaker 3: corridors in the opposite direction, because we're always thinking about, oh,
Speaker 3: it's the golfer's perspective, the golfer's perspective. But in winter
Speaker 3: Park it was a weird animal because we were also
Speaker 3: cognizant of the other people's perspective, the people commuting driving by,
Speaker 3: the people walking their dog down the street, the people
Speaker 3: biking by. We wanted to give them the experience of
Speaker 3: the golf course without having to play it. So another
Speaker 3: example at Winter Park would have been before we'd got there,
Speaker 3: there was an entire cluster of trees hiding the train tracks.
Speaker 3: And so we felt like, rather than denying the train tracks,
Speaker 3: rather than camouflaging, hiding and concealing them, let's embrace it
Speaker 3: and bring it into the golf course physically and visually.
Speaker 3: So what we did was we cleared all those trees
Speaker 3: and we tied the golf course into the train tracks
Speaker 3: rather than try and hide them. And if you stand
Speaker 3: on six Keys today and you see a train going by,
Speaker 3: it'll appear as if the train is driving on top
Speaker 3: of the golf holes. We visually tried to connect the
Speaker 3: grade and the train tracks in a way that your
Speaker 3: perspective gave the illusion that the train was floating on
Speaker 3: top of the grass, right. And so those are just
Speaker 3: those are just the little nuances of tying in. We
Speaker 3: wanted to tie in the fact that historically and culturally,
Speaker 3: this train track, this train system was instrumental in the
Speaker 3: creation and development and success of winter part as a community.
Speaker 3: And so there's the historical tie in, right, and so
Speaker 3: now people can they have a connection with the train tracks,
Speaker 3: with the golf course, the community and visually they all
Speaker 3: kind of get bridged together. And you know, audibly you
Speaker 3: can hear the train whistle, right, You can hear the
Speaker 3: train whistle from different parts of the golf course. So
Speaker 3: all these kind of things do tie in to create
Speaker 3: a sense of place like you and Blake were talking about,
Speaker 3: but also gives the site and the golf course a
Speaker 3: bit more of a distinct DNA to it. It's a
Speaker 3: more distinct product. At the end of the day, it's
Speaker 3: more memorable, there's more intrigue, there's more interest, there's more
Speaker 3: layers of flavor to the golf experience, and that, at
Speaker 3: the end of the day, is really the objective of
Speaker 3: all of this.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and I think that's a beautiful idea where you
Speaker 1: have brought the course closer to the community and made
Speaker 1: it feel more a part of the community. And that's
Speaker 1: something I think that a lot of us want out
Speaker 1: of our neighborhood courses where it doesn't seem like something
Speaker 1: apart but rather just as much a component of the
Speaker 1: community as a town square or a restaurant or a
Speaker 1: movie theater. There's the golf course as well, and it's
Speaker 1: part of the town. It's not a separate section. Now,
Speaker 1: I think that's a wonderful idea, but does it sometimes
Speaker 1: come into conflict with questions of safety because obviously, one
Speaker 1: of the big ways that you can accomplish visual tie
Speaker 1: ins between a neighborhood golf course and the surrounding neighborhood
Speaker 1: is by removing trees. When you remove trees, there's a
Speaker 1: sense that, you know, perhaps not an accurate sense, but
Speaker 1: at least some people would suspect that golf balls would
Speaker 1: more easily travel from the golf course to places that
Speaker 1: you don't want them to go off the golf course.
Speaker 1: So was there ever some tension in your renovation of
Speaker 1: Winter Park between tie ins and safety.
Speaker 3: Yes, I mean that was that was something that we
Speaker 3: brought up right away, and we just made it clear
Speaker 3: that inherently this golf course is dangerous. Basically, look, we're
Speaker 3: inheriting a golf course next to streets, and we can't
Speaker 3: move the streets housing the people walking there. That I
Speaker 3: can't control how people hit their golf bawl what they
Speaker 3: you know, there's too many factors. So we just made
Speaker 3: sure that we covered our bots and just said, look,
Speaker 3: this is an inherently dangerous golf course. We're going to
Speaker 3: do our best to help prevent and mitigate any sort
Speaker 3: of conflicts. Safety is something that we're definitely going to
Speaker 3: try to design into it when we're designed and in
Speaker 3: the field, we made sure that we angled tea boxes
Speaker 3: in a way that hopefully directs to play a little
Speaker 3: bit away from the streets. You know, we were very
Speaker 3: aware that we didn't want to put bunkers necessarily where
Speaker 3: if you sculled your shot, you would shoot directly into
Speaker 3: the street or across a sidewalk. So, yes, we we
Speaker 3: were very aware of the safety component and our design
Speaker 3: we felt reflected those concerns as best as we possibly
Speaker 3: could without sacrificing, you know, without putting up a fence
Speaker 3: and nets and you know, doing all these alternative means
Speaker 3: of protecting people's safety through those kind of measures. So
Speaker 3: it was it's tricky, but yeah, no, that's a it's
Speaker 3: a concern, But what can you do.
Speaker 1: Right, Well, you're going to have a golf course there,
Speaker 1: then sometimes sometimes there are going to be some wayward shots.
Speaker 1: So we've talked about a couple of courses that you've
Speaker 1: worked on. Maybe we could talk about some courses that
Speaker 1: you've seen, some that you admire. Can you think of
Speaker 1: any courses that people might know about that you think
Speaker 1: have particularly exceptional tie ins, whether they're recently built courses
Speaker 1: or ones from one hundred years ago. Which courses come
Speaker 1: to mind when you think of excellent tie ins.
Speaker 3: The one that jumps to mind just immediately, and it
Speaker 3: jumps to mind because of how they flip the script
Speaker 3: on this particular golf courses in terms of the genre
Speaker 3: of tian would be Pineer's number two. Before the tians
Speaker 3: used to be turf and trees, right, And when Bill
Speaker 3: and Ben went in there and did their restoration work,
Speaker 3: all of a sudden it became wiregrass, sand and pine needles. Right.
Speaker 3: It had a fully different feel to a different texture,
Speaker 3: different plant So that's now we're getting into the physical,
Speaker 3: the environmental, the visual. I think those tians are spectacular
Speaker 3: because it was created by man, right, but it took
Speaker 3: its cues from the line of sandbuilt and the pines
Speaker 3: and the different vegetation of that area. So I think
Speaker 3: I think Piner's Number two has beautiful tie ins, and
Speaker 3: then Heathland courses in England they do a really good
Speaker 3: job of tying their golf course in with the natural surrounds,
Speaker 3: using heather as the primary element of glue, so to speak,
Speaker 3: to connect those two things. Once again, you got your color,
Speaker 3: your texture, your you know, your vegetation and all these
Speaker 3: different things, you know, which at the end of the day,
Speaker 3: you know, design is it's all the same whether you're
Speaker 3: designing a house or a golf course or anything or
Speaker 3: car for that matter. Everyone uses the same design elements
Speaker 3: to achieve whatever they're trying to achieve, and so that's
Speaker 3: perspective lot you know, line, form, color, texture, repetition, emphasis, balance, variety, scale, symmetry,
Speaker 3: all of those things are design tools, elements that you
Speaker 3: can use when trying to conceal your work or connect
Speaker 3: your work or tie in your work. And so a
Speaker 3: lot of the tie ins that we're talking about here,
Speaker 3: whether that was Tiner's Number two or the heather in
Speaker 3: the Heathland courses, a lot of that is uh, you know,
Speaker 3: form and color and texture. But you know Royal Dorn
Speaker 3: it's another example, right, they ties in using gorse and
Speaker 3: the connecting thread throughout the entire property. Royal Melbourne and
Speaker 3: the sand belt courses in Australia, they tie into their
Speaker 3: existing landforms in a way that's distinct to the sand belt, right.
Speaker 3: You know, Cypress point ties in with the Monterey Peninsula
Speaker 3: in a way that you know, that's why that course
Speaker 3: just has that spiritual Now we're getting in the spiritual component.
Speaker 3: But the way that the golf course ties into the
Speaker 3: rocks the ocean, the way that the bunkers, the form
Speaker 3: of the bunkers mimic the form of the cypress trees, right,
Speaker 3: and how all of these things all of a sudden
Speaker 3: start interplaying with each other in a way that makes
Speaker 3: that golf course or any of these golf courses we
Speaker 3: just discussed, fit into their landscape, fit into their home
Speaker 3: in a way that looks completely seamless, as if no
Speaker 3: one moved a spoonful of dirt sand Hills Nebraska. Right.
Speaker 3: They didn't go with Kentucky bluegrass and get it all
Speaker 3: vibrant green. They went with fescus, and the fescus bleed
Speaker 3: into the fair wind bleed out of the fairway. You know,
Speaker 3: the golf course looks found and discovered the way that
Speaker 3: the sand scabs of those bunkers, you know, splash using
Speaker 3: the wind. They look like they were created by the
Speaker 3: by the wind, and you know those tie into the
Speaker 3: character and the patterns of the area, of the region,
Speaker 3: of the entire sand hill region. So you know, it's
Speaker 3: all of these kind of different elements go in as layers,
Speaker 3: and it's almost like you go into a golf course
Speaker 3: project first stripping layers away, and then you go build
Speaker 3: the golf course and then you start bringing the layers back,
Speaker 3: you start melding them together, so it's almost like you're right,
Speaker 3: you add a little bit of ingredients here, a little
Speaker 3: bit there, so you know, you want to get a
Speaker 3: little bit of color and texture there. It moves your
Speaker 3: eye this way, and maybe you want to get that
Speaker 3: horizon line of that bunker over there, so maybe you
Speaker 3: can use it to obscure a building or an unsightly
Speaker 3: view that you don't want, or maybe that bunker needs
Speaker 3: to feed into the shoulder of an existing hill that's
Speaker 3: emerging out of the trees, and so you play off
Speaker 3: of that existing landform. You use accents from the landforms
Speaker 3: all around you, and then you place the golf element
Speaker 3: in there, and then you blend the two together. And
Speaker 3: so as you go to completing the golf course, you
Speaker 3: slowly start getting that balance and that variety and that
Speaker 3: scales right, and all these different textures and colors, and
Speaker 3: then it comes all the way down to the maintenance,
Speaker 3: where then the grassing lines are another big component of
Speaker 3: tie in. Right, you can go from a sand Hills
Speaker 3: or a Pinehurst Number two like we just discussed, where
Speaker 3: the grass and the edges of the sands scrapes seem
Speaker 3: to bleed with each other, right, giving you this harmonious
Speaker 3: kind of feel to the landscape as if it was
Speaker 3: inherently always there. But then you could use desert golf
Speaker 3: as the antithesis to that exact theory of well, now
Speaker 3: we have a landscape that's dry and arid and brown
Speaker 3: and dusty and all these different and then you have
Speaker 3: this green, lush golf course and usually the line is hard, right.
Speaker 3: Not very often you can blend those two environmental factors.
Speaker 3: You know, one requires water, one doesn't have any water.
Speaker 3: But that's where you could go to the extreme on
Speaker 3: the spectrum of almost blatantly accepting that there is no
Speaker 3: tie in, or we're not going to even attempt to
Speaker 3: tie in. We're going to delineate a hard line and
Speaker 3: that's going to be our design element. That's the form
Speaker 3: that we want to express. And so that hard line
Speaker 3: of a green, lush fairway and then a stark line
Speaker 3: where there's brown desert. That's a conscious decision of no time.
Speaker 3: So the different sites call for different modes of tying in.
Speaker 1: Sure. Yeah. Now, now you've obviously been influenced by the
Speaker 1: people that you've worked with, and a few times in
Speaker 1: our conversation we've mentioned Krn Crenshaw and Coren Crenshaw always
Speaker 1: come up as kind of the gold standard of executing
Speaker 1: tie ins. The detail work just seems to be really
Speaker 1: under control at all of their courses, where the course
Speaker 1: never really feels like it's been imposed on the landscape.
Speaker 1: It always feels like it blends. So I'm curious, as
Speaker 1: somebody who's worked for that firm, worked with Bill and Ben,
Speaker 1: what did you learn from them about approaching this part
Speaker 1: of the craft.
Speaker 3: I think it all begins with the routing. The reason
Speaker 3: they're able to tie in their golf courses in such
Speaker 3: an effortless looking presentation is because they got the voting
Speaker 3: right from day one. So finding golf holes that will
Speaker 3: naturally sit topographically is right then and there, that gives
Speaker 3: you the possibility to tie it in. Right, If you're
Speaker 3: forcing it onto a piece of ground, your tians all
Speaker 3: of a sudden become much more difficult, you know. I
Speaker 3: think for them, they just they celebrate the diversity in
Speaker 3: the landscape and they elevate it and they don't mute
Speaker 3: it or sanitize it. And that's the key, right and so,
Speaker 3: but I think at the end of the day, Bill
Speaker 3: and Ben, they just they've studied this craft for so
Speaker 3: long and they know how important it is to get
Speaker 3: those details right. Anything that's kind of forced or contrived
Speaker 3: is just less appealing to the human eye, to the
Speaker 3: to the experience. I don't know what it is that
Speaker 3: we humans like about a beautifully flowing, connected, harmonious landscape,
Speaker 3: but we do. And so that's all we're trying to do,
Speaker 3: is you know, we know as this, we like this.
Speaker 3: It gives us pleasure. Making the golf hole look naturally
Speaker 3: in place in its sight is something that we tend
Speaker 3: to value as golfers. And I don't know why, what
Speaker 3: do you think, why do we why do we value that? Right?
Speaker 1: Yeah, Well, as you were. As you were asking that question,
Speaker 1: I was thinking, I wonder like if an evolutionary neuroscientist
Speaker 1: could answer this question for us, Right, is there something
Speaker 1: deeply encoded in our humanity that responds well to a
Speaker 1: natural landscape and to man made forms that blend in
Speaker 1: with the natural landscape. I think there probably is, you know,
Speaker 1: because I think that humans are pretty good. Maybe not
Speaker 1: as good as other animals at this, but humans are
Speaker 1: pretty good at picking out the unnatural, just in the
Speaker 1: way that when animation or special effects try to mimic
Speaker 1: the human face, we're really good at picking out Hey,
Speaker 1: that's wrong, that's fake. We're maybe not as good with
Speaker 1: the landscape. But I think there's a similar reaction that
Speaker 1: we might have where we see something that doesn't fit
Speaker 1: in a landscape, that doesn't register as natural, and we
Speaker 1: say immediately, Yep, that's bs, that's fake. I don't like that.
Speaker 1: That that makes me feel a little bit queasy. There's
Speaker 1: a there's an effect of the uncanny where where where
Speaker 1: it just doesn't it doesn't feel right. I don't know,
Speaker 1: does it. Does that resonate with with you at all?
Speaker 3: Well, that's it? Well, so in landscape architecture, there's there's
Speaker 3: all sorts of your design principles, but then you also
Speaker 3: have your kind of set theories or or you know
Speaker 3: what you'd want to call it. But basically it's uh,
Speaker 3: you know, you got your you guys talked about space
Speaker 3: in place, right, and then you have form versus function, right,
Speaker 3: you have conceal and reveal, compression and release. You know
Speaker 3: in golf we have strategic and penal, right. And then
Speaker 3: one of the ones in landscape art texture is called
Speaker 3: prospect refuge. And the theory behind that one is is
Speaker 3: we you know, at the dawn of human civilization, we
Speaker 3: preferred the savannah is our home, as our hunting grounds
Speaker 3: is our you know, the ecotype that we preferred as
Speaker 3: a species. And the theory behind it is the savannah.
Speaker 3: You have the prospect in front of you of underneath
Speaker 3: the canopy of the trees, and then you have the
Speaker 3: refuge of the trees behind you. So it's kind of
Speaker 3: a blend between. You know, in old stories, the dark
Speaker 3: woods was always a theme, right, the dark woods, and
Speaker 3: that's the savannah too. That's too close, right, the Handsel
Speaker 3: and Gretel of It's scary, it's dark, it's mystical, it's unknown,
Speaker 3: it's dangerous. You get all these kind of different feelings
Speaker 3: out of a dark force where an open prairie, you
Speaker 3: also get a feeling of where do I run to
Speaker 3: hide if I need to? Where's my protection, Where's my refuge?
Speaker 3: And so the savannah bridges those two, This is the theory,
Speaker 3: at least the the savannah bridges those two together in
Speaker 3: a perfect combination, a mixture of prospect and refuge. And
Speaker 3: that's why we like parks so much, right because we
Speaker 3: have sparsely planted trees. We have the prospect, and we
Speaker 3: have the refuge, and it inherently makes us feel comfortable.
Speaker 3: And if that is a theory that actually holds water,
Speaker 3: maybe that's why golf courses are something that we enjoy experiencing.
Speaker 3: But also people who don't necessarily even golf will look
Speaker 3: at a golf course photo and go that gives me comfort,
Speaker 3: you know, whatever that feeling is, and maybe it goes
Speaker 3: all the way back to our holmost sapien days.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's fascinating, and it opens up all these ways
Speaker 1: in which an architect can play with the emotions of
Speaker 1: a golfer very subtly by making them feel insecure at
Speaker 1: certain points and then offering security at other points in
Speaker 1: a routing of a golf course. Right, if we if
Speaker 1: we feel back to go in landscapes where where there's
Speaker 1: there's some opportunity for refuge as well as a prospect,
Speaker 1: then that's a great thing for an architect to know,
Speaker 1: because when I'm plunging you deep into the woods, You're
Speaker 1: going to feel a little bit weird. And when I'm
Speaker 1: throwing you out onto a huge open space where there's
Speaker 1: nothing to hang on to, then you're going to feel
Speaker 1: a little bit weird there too. And and so you know,
Speaker 1: kind of just as jazz musicians know that we don't
Speaker 1: like dissonance and that we want it to be resolved,
Speaker 1: golf architects could could play with the same type of
Speaker 1: emotion in golfers.
Speaker 3: That's it, right, and and and then golf So now
Speaker 3: you take that's just the landscape, right, we're just talking
Speaker 3: times and how do we make that landscape believable? How
Speaker 3: do we make it look plausible that nature created this
Speaker 3: and we just mowed it out and put a pin
Speaker 3: flag there and called it done. Right, But then you
Speaker 3: had this element of golf is an art piece that's
Speaker 3: meant to be played, experienced and interacted with. Right, So
Speaker 3: now you got this. You know deception, it's plan confusion,
Speaker 3: and so we're now we're sprinkling planned confusion and deception
Speaker 3: and illusion and warped perspectives and you know, visual emphasis
Speaker 3: and all these kind of tricks of landscape design to
Speaker 3: make the golfer react or imagine or think or do
Speaker 3: something that is perhaps we're subtly or passively nudging a
Speaker 3: golfer in a certain direction or doing something to their
Speaker 3: state of mind subconsciously they're not quite sure of. But
Speaker 3: that's where you know the design components of building a
Speaker 3: hazard or deception and all those things, and then tying
Speaker 3: those in to the landform now gives it that believability.
Speaker 3: And now you have this adventure on a planned landscape
Speaker 3: that looks like it was found, and there's something about
Speaker 3: that that gives us immense pleasure.
Speaker 1: So tie ins deliver pleasure through deception. They fool us
Speaker 1: into believing that the planned landscape was found and that
Speaker 1: our golfing adventure belongs to that old genre of man
Speaker 1: versus nature. And we might know we're being hoodwinked, but
Speaker 1: we're too delighted to be offended. That's the idea anyway,
Speaker 1: and it reminds me right away of Alistair Mackenzie. The
Speaker 1: chief object of every golf architector greenkeeper worth his salt,
Speaker 1: he says in his nineteen twenty book Golf Architecture, is
Speaker 1: to imitate the beauties of nature so closely as to
Speaker 1: make his work indistinguishable from nature itself. Further along in
Speaker 1: the book, Mackenzie goes into the mechanics behind nature fakery.
Speaker 1: He makes a famous analogy between building golf courses and
Speaker 1: building military earthworks. Through his service in the Second Boer War.
Speaker 1: In World War One, Mackenzie became an expert in camouflage,
Speaker 1: designing fortifications that blended in with the terrain. The parallels
Speaker 1: to his style of golf architecture offered themselves readily. Successful
Speaker 1: golf course construction and successful camouflage, he writes, are almost
Speaker 1: entirely due to the utilization of natural features to the
Speaker 1: fullest extent, and to the construction of artificial ones indistinguishable
Speaker 1: from nature. He was, in other words, creating tie ins.
Speaker 1: For Mackenzie, tie ins were all about deception. Deceive the
Speaker 1: enemy to defeat him, deceive the golfer to delight him.
Speaker 1: It's true that a man made landform in harmony with
Speaker 1: a natural one brings us pleasure. Conversely, when the man
Speaker 1: made clashes with the natural, we may feel uncomfortable. Since
Speaker 1: golf should be pleasurable, it stands to reason that courses should,
Speaker 1: as Mackenzie puts it, imitate the beauties of nature. At
Speaker 1: the same time, discomfort is a powerful tool for any artist.
Speaker 1: Comedians are masters of it, just as jazz musicians are
Speaker 1: masters of dissonance. And any good storyteller knows how to
Speaker 1: unsettle us, how to give us alternating experiences of tension
Speaker 1: and release. So why shouldn't golf architects do the same
Speaker 1: with tie ins. At one moment, they could draw attention
Speaker 1: to the artificiality of their work. At the next they
Speaker 1: could provide the comforting release of camouflage. I don't know.
Speaker 1: Maybe this idea is more fun to babble about on
Speaker 1: the podcast than it is to put in the ground,
Speaker 1: but an interest to me because the future of golf
Speaker 1: course design is a big question mark right now. Bill
Speaker 1: Corr and Tom Doak are in the fourth decade of
Speaker 1: their careers, and the many talented architects they've trained, like
Speaker 1: Riley Johns are starting to get major jobs. Where will
Speaker 1: this new generation take the craft. How will they differentiate
Speaker 1: themselves from their mentors or from the heroes of their mentors.
Speaker 1: It's possible that some of them will decide that imitating
Speaker 1: the beauties of nature is not in fact their chief object.
Speaker 1: If you want to dig deeper into tie ins, I've
Speaker 1: put together a post for this episode on the Frida
Speaker 1: egg dot com. It has photos, resources, and some extras
Speaker 1: from my conversation with Riley. You can also connect with
Speaker 1: me on Twitter at g fod Golf, with Riley at
Speaker 1: Integrative Golf, and with the Friday Egg at the Friday
Speaker 1: Egg with underscores between each word. Let's keep the discussion going.