Not every course can be built on land that is perfectly suited to golf. We ask several architects about the most difficult sites they have encountered in their careers
Golf media can make it easy to believe that every golf course is built on a perfect piece of land. It’s not hard to see why.
Creating a course among beautiful sand dunes next to the ocean is a more obvious story than wrestling eighteen holes out of pancake flat clay, or working on an old landfill, atop tonnes and tonnes of refuse, which might even be toxic.
But the reality of golf architecture is that most courses are built to serve a particular local market, and the quality of the site is not the only thing taken into consideration when choosing it. So, the fortunate few architects whose practice has seen them design courses that have become destinations for which golfers will travel long distances – which demands great land – are not the mainstream of the profession. More common is the task of trying to tease out a reasonably silky purse from a sow’s ear.
Veteran American architect Steve Smyers has spent most of his career on such sites. “I graduated from the University of Florida in December 1975, and I went to work part-time for a golf architect in January 1976,” he says. “The job market was very sparse at the time, and the economy was very weak. Everything we did back then was real estate driven, and almost all golf architects were regional.
“So, everything we did was in Florida, and everything we did was in swamps. They put us where the worst soils were, and we would have to design the golf course to make the real estate valuable. Everything was driven by engineering – we had to handle a certain amount of stormwater runoff, provide a certain amount of fill for the homes, and provide a certain amount of golf course views from the homes.
“Fast forward to 1994, and I had started my own business. I was just starting off, and I did Old Memorial [this article’s main image] in Tampa for the founders of Outback Steakhouse. It was very strongly criticised in the golf industry at the time because it didn’t have real estate, and people said it would never make it.
“I found the site, and there was only three feet of elevation change across the entire property. There is always some movement on a property – water movement, tree lines, vegetation – always something that catches your eye, no matter how boring the site is, and I look for that. At Old Memorial, we had natural lakes, which were nice, and an area of oak trees – what I call ‘landscape rooms’. I tried to create a journey through those rooms to create variety in the setting. I didn’t want every hole to be the same. Although we didn’t have movement in the land, we had spatial settings, and were able to create features that would be in keeping with the land. There were some unique features – there always are – so I tried to create patterns to make the eye move around the property and give you a good feeling about the site. I tried to create a dominant point on each hole that your eye would focus on.”
A long time ago, I was lucky enough to travel with Smyers to Iceland, where he had been hired to build a course on the country’s south coast, among dunes made of black volcanic sand. To this day, I remember vividly what he told me on the way to the site: that he had spent his life working on projects that demanded massive amounts of engineering to make them function as courses. So, when he got the Icelandic job, he was excited. Finally, he would get chance to work on a property naturally suited for golf and be able simply to lay the holes out on the ground. When he got to the site, however, he found that the dunes were not grassed, but incredibly mobile, with sand blowing everywhere, and would require even more engineering than his other jobs! The project, sadly, never came to fruition, a casualty of the financial crisis of 2007-08.
Australian architect Neil Crafter says his toughest site was his most recent; the rebuild of the Chatswood course to the north-west of Sydney. “The old course was a very small eighteen with three crossing holes,” he explains. “The club did a deal with a developer to build retirement apartments in the area that used to be its car park and clubhouse, and that funded the rebuilding of the course as twelve holes – we believe the first purpose-built twelve-hole course in Australia. Building the apartments required a substantial excavation into a sandstone escarpment, and we had to dispose of the material taken out – about 70,000 cubic metres – on the golf course. Nine of the new holes are on land the club owns, and the other three are on leased land that previously held four and a half holes.”
Neil Crafter says his toughest site is his most recent, the Chatswood course north-west of Sydney, Australia (Photo: Neil Crafter)
As well as the complications of land tenure, and the need to dispose of the fill, which was crushed and spread across seven holes, to an average depth of between one and two metres, though the deepest fill measures seven metres, Crafter says the drainage patterns across the site were very complicated, and there were a number of existing sewer lines running across it. He says: “The fill had to be kept on site, as the local council was unhappy with the idea of thousands of trucks running through neighbouring residential streets and having it dumped elsewhere.” The course – now known as Newgreens Chatswood – is a par 45 of 3,303 yards.
Another current project that represents the architects’ greatest challenge is the Plover Cove course in Hong Kong, which is under construction and designed by the team of Dana Fry and Jason Straka. The fourth-most densely populated region on Earth, Hong Kong is obviously a phenomenally difficult place to find land for and build golf; Plover Cove is only happening because the course is being constructed on top of the Shuen Wan landfill site, which was used to dispose of the territory’s waste for many years until it was closed in 1995.
A number of courses have previously been constructed on closed landfill sites, such as the Ferry Point course in New York and Harborside in Chicago. As those two locations might suggest, the difficulty and expense of building on such sites is likely only to be worthwhile in highly populated areas where other sites are simply not available. Straka says: “We’ve worked on restored landfill sites before and, generally, we don’t recommend golf courses to be placed on them simply because it is extraordinarily complex and expensive. However, in Hong Kong, where there is little land available that is not earmarked for development or preservation, it can make sense.
“There are literally dozens upon dozens of restrictions and challenges when building on a landfill, even one as old as this. The site is small to begin with at around 130 acres. Couple that with very steep side slopes (think of it as a big dome) and it was a work of art and engineering to simply fit a golf course on the property.
“There is a soil cap over the trash which cannot be cut into. So, in a few spots we had perhaps a metre of cut that we were allowed to make, but in most areas we could only fill. The fill is being brought in over time from building excavations around the city. To create flattish fairways, we can only fill the low side of the holes, recalling that we cannot cut and fill on any hole to make the necessary cross-slopes for the golf holes.
“Every significant fill had to be analysed for compression of the trash under it. So, to meet the elevations we were seeking, compression tests were required so that we could overfill the areas to meet the grades we needed. That means that careful pre-analysis needed to occur with minimal field changes permissible so as not to change the compression factor one way or the other.
“There are kilometres of piping, both for drainage of the landfill and to convey methane, that had to be accounted for. All of these come to the surface in some fashion or another and are locally called ‘expressions’. Much of this pipe has to be relocated and all of the expressions relocated so they can be brought to the new surface and hidden within landscape areas of the golf course. Unlike landfills in many other countries, this one is permitted to have trees. Many of the trees are protected, further limiting the routing of the golf holes. One section, which is about a hectare in size, is a roosting area for a protected species of birds and could not be touched. Additionally, there were several heritage trees that could not touched and/or had to be relocated and not removed.”
Plover Cove in Hong Kong is being built on a site that was used as landfill for over 20 years (Photo: Plover Cove Golf Club)
Straka further explained that no surface water can run off-site and into the adjoining Tolo Harbour, so the course’s design captures all the runoff, in every situation except for a major typhoon. The water is then used for irrigation.
“Plover Cove is a wholly created landscape,” he says. “It will sit well once we are done with it, but we are creating something magical out of literally nothing, other than the striking off-site views of the harbour, cityscape and mountains beyond. Very fortunately, and unlike landfills in other countries, we are permitted, and even required, to re-landscape the site. Thousands upon thousands of trees, shrubs, ground covers and other plants will be brought into the site. It is going to be a magnificent transformation.” (Read more about Plover Cove on page 72.)
British designer Adrian Stiff says that the bigger problems with a site are best resolved during the design and routing stage, rather than in construction, when things are likely to get expensive. “Every site presents different problems,” he says. “Getting over topographic issues, such as trying to find the best way to navigate steep land, is probably the toughest thing from a design point of view.” He cites Dainton Park, which he built in the early 1990s in south Devon, not far from Dartmoor, as his greatest challenge in that respect. “For me the first priority in routing is to create a course that is walkable, and obviously the more contoured the land, the harder that is,” he says. “Other issues come to light during construction. Poor soils or rock are hard to fix.”
When Adrian Stiff designed Dainton Park in Devon, UK, in the 1990s, his primary challenge was navigating steep land (Photo: Dainton Park Golf Club)
Sam Thomas, director of developments at GEO Foundation of Sustainable Golf, says: “What we have been most impressed by in terms of team creativity and golf architecture’s positive impact on land has probably been the regeneration of old, fallow, poor-quality agriculture or industrial land. Forgotten crop fields and sugar cane plantations that no longer pay their way, quarries that have had the easy material harvested – those are places that have been badly impacted by anthropogenic activities but are then healed through golf course creation and good land stewardship.
“Golf is an elastic land use, and we view it as a potentially powerful green regeneration tool. Those awkward disrupted sites we have worked with over the past 10 years have seen transformations in real biodiversity jumps, reconnected habitat networks and renewed green-blue infrastructure networks that – alongside good golf – have breathed life back into the land and, in some instances, the communities of the places. We’ve seen this globally in places like Australia, Mauritius, St Kitts, Pakistan, Northern Ireland, Brazil and Sweden.”