Are golf courses high art? Yes, according to author Steve Sailer, in an article published five years ago in The American Conservative. The article, From Bauhaus to Golf Course: The Rise, Fall, and Revival of the Art of Golf Course Architecture was for me a fascinating read, and you can get a sense of where Sailer is heading from the opening paragraphs:

Golf course architecture is one of the world’s most expansive but least recognized art forms. Yet this curiously obscure profession can help shed light on mainstream art, sociology, and even human nature itself, since the golf designer, more than any other artist, tries to reproduce the primeval human vision of an earthly paradise.

Yet even this most unfashionable of arts was swept in the middle of the last century by the same Bauhaus-derived tastes that made post-WWII modernist buildings so tedious. Only recently has golf course architecture begun to revive the styles and values of its golden age in the 1920s.

One interesting observation Sailer makes is that studies have shown that—even across cultures—the “preferred” landscape is one that combines open grassy areas, interspersed with stands of trees. It’s perhaps a genetic memory of the African savannah, but it may explain why golf course landscapes have such human appeal.

Following golf history through art history, Sailer writes of golf architecture’s utilitarian, boring Bauhaus movement after World War II—as epitomized by Trent Jones—and then of the postmodern era brought in by Pete Dye. In recent years, Sailer says, golf as art has headed back to its roots with a traditionalist approach. Here’s another great observation from Sailer, comparing modern art and course architecture:

Prosperity and technology have made anything possible in design, whether Frank Gehry’s titanium UFO-crash of a Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, or Dye’s 1999 Whistling Straits golf course, where faucet king Herb Kohler gave him an unlimited budget. Dye famously exceeded it reproducing on a flat Wisconsin shoreline the fifty-foot tall sand dunes of the wild Irish links. While Whistling Straits and its 500 or so sand traps was much admired at last year’s PGA Championship, critics might be overreacting against the stripped-down Modern style by judging any degree of elaboration an asset. If tastes shift back toward simplicity, the next generation might label Whistling Straits a labyrinthine monstrosity. But, at least for now, its convolutedness appeals.

Sailer finishes with an observation about the current state of golf architecture as art, and its possible future:

Today, the great controversy is between the established Fazio, the maestro of aesthetics who recently revamped Augusta, and challengers like the team of Ben Crenshaw - Bill Coore and the sharp-tongued Doak, the expert on angles who crafted on the remote Oregon coast the gnarled and byzantine Pacific Dunes links in the Scottish tradition. Fazio frames his holes so that first-time players can instantly see the proper line, while Doak’s baffling holes defy golfers to figure out which direction will work best.

Golf architecture is a young art, and just as Tiger Woods showed that the best was yet to come among players, it’sPacific Dunes 13, par 4, Oregon, designed by Tom Doak forgivable to hope that we will someday see a design prodigy who can fully merge beauty and guile.

Read the entire article. Its long and a bit convoluted, but I found it fascinating.

Mike Weir wants to get into course design.

I’m not surprised. I think you’d be hard pressed to find a successful pro who doesn’t think about that line of work.

But I’m not at all sure that professional golfers are the best judges of what makes a good course. I’ve played several courses designed by famous pros, and I don’t know that they’re worth the fuss. The Els course I played was fun, as were the Palmer and Nicklaus courses, but they’re not on my must-play lists. On the other hand, the Tom Weiskopf-designed Forest Dunes may be the best I’ve ever encountered.

My favorite courses have actually been laid out by relatively unknown designers, or by outright amateurs. Those courses tend to have an air of “friendliness” that the others lack. The designers of those courses weren’t out to impress people with their architectural skills, but to construct a course that was fun, and that people wanted to play.

Weir may the right attitude, though:

“I think of my dad,” Weir said “I want to build courses that somebody who is a 20-handicapper can play.”

That sounds promising.

To be fair to the pro golfer designers, however, I haven’t really played enough of their courses to make a sound judgment. So I’m really interested in other’s judgments about celebrity golfer designed courses. Worth playing, or lacking in value?

Golf Digest has a fascinating article on the future direction of golf architecture.

It’s a sort of back to the future movement, with the works of CB MacDonald at the core.

My favorite quote in the article is from Jim Engh:

“American golf isn’t exciting for people these days,” says Jim Engh, whose art-deco style has resulted in four Best New course awards from Golf Digest since 1997. “That’s why we’re losing golfers. It doesn’t touch people’s creative spirits. Figuring out how to play a golf hole is one way to generate compelling interest.

“Toss a rock into a mud puddle,” Engh says. “The patterns that result, that’s Dadaism, the art of randomness. That’s what we should be doing, creating interesting landforms, have wide corridors, and let people figure out how to play the hole. That’s how the game began. This whole idea of diagramming shots, dictating how a hole should be played, that’s a bunch of hooey. Just do an interesting hole; let golfers figure it out. That’s the most fun. Golfers will be back 30 times, until they find a way to successfully play the hole. Or another way to play the hole. Or a different way than the way they played it last week.

“Width is good,” Engh adds. “You can do all kinds of things with width—more angles you can play. If you go narrow, you have one element, and that’s it. Width keeps people in play, makes the game a little more enjoyable.”

The January 2008 issue of Golf Digest features that magazine’s latest “Best New Courses” list.

While I’ve always been skeptical of such lists, I still think they’re a lot of fun to read. I always scan them to see if there are any within driving distance of GolfBlogger World Headquarters. There aren’t any in Michigan this year, but there’s one in Fairfax, Virginia, near my brother’s home.

The truth, of course, is that the BEST new course is one that you can easily get to, and that makes you think “That was fun. I’d like to go back.”

A new course opening in Luxembourg will have synthetic putting greens, and architect Steve Marnoch says that it is now possible to build a totally synthetic golf course, right down to the bunkers.

“There is gathering interest in such a project,” Marnoch, a senior member of the European Institute of Golf Course Architects admitted. “There would be a huge initial outlay but, against that, there would be relatively little in the way of upkeep. The variety of today’s synthetic grasses is such that we could produce everything, right down to the different grades of rough they use for championships.”

The Kikuoka club doesn’t go that far, and its plastic greens apparently are not up to championship standards, but Marnoch gives them a seven out of ten. Speed can be adjusted by the amount of sand that is raked among the plastic blades of grass.

I actually had an idea for a synthetic, indoor golf course a few years ago when I was driving through Willow Run, Michigan. I had noticed (how could you fail to notice) the massive, empty factory buildings and was wondering what could be done with them. It then occurred to me that they would be perfect for an indoor golf course. They are impossibly large, and the roofs are several stories high. An entrepreneur could gut the insides and build an 18 hole pitch-and-putt or maybe even several full sized holes.

There’s got to be a market for that sort of thing in Michigan.

As any geek (like myself) knows, The Lord of the Rings was filmed in New Zealand and for the movie Peter Jackson built a replica of the Shire, complete with the requisite underground houses. The hobbit holes were left behind and now apparently are a major tourist attraction.

The idea apparently has caught on. A New Zealand developer has built a course with an underground clubhouse that has a grass roof. The roof is in play.

Developer Michael Hill’s course (known as The Hills, naturally), will host the New Zealand Open this week.

Hill also plans to build 17 homes on the course. Presumably much bigger than Bag End, these luxury villas will range from around 4,000 to 7,000 square feet.

Whether they match a hobbit hole in comfort remains to be seen. Tolkien tells us that hobbit holes “mean comfort.”

Hills says: “The whole idea is for the houses to merge into the landscape…If we can get them to remain nearly invisible then we’ve achieved what we want for the site.”

Its an amazing idea, and one that I’m surprised has not been thought of before.

The World’s Most Dangerous Golf club is arguably the Kabul Golf Course in Afghanistan. It’s a true desert course, with greens made of sand and oil. Worse, the threat of suicide bombers loom, making the bunkers at your local course look positively inviting.