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Originally Posted by blueandgoldguy
Good Post. Thanks for the feedback.
A couple of questions...
I recognize the name Les Ferber. You stated that he designed courses from a more recent era of golf course architecture which is regrettable. How are these courses different from older ones and in what ways are they regrettable?
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The 80s and 90s saw one of the booms in golf course construction and unfortunately it was an era where there was a lot of copycats (or to be fair to the architects, an era where a lot of developers wanted copycat designs). With so much competition a lot of people wanted either a specific architect's course or a style of course.
However this desire to get a specific style of course meant that a lot of courses started looking the same. What makes most great courses unique is that they are so well built into their landscape. So land moving increased, architects started using more and more templates (stories of developers holding up a calendar and saying "I think this hole would look great here, can you do that?") and then people realized that they would need something to set them apart with all of this competition. So this was the age of "signatures" which more often than not just led to gimmicky golf holes like the canyon Par 3 at pretty much every mountain course in the west (for every 'Cliffhanger' there are a dozen other canyon Par 3s that are at best forgettable and are often the worst holes on their respective golf courses), ridiculous bunkering, blind shots, multiple fairways that force club selection and many other things that created a "wow" in the renderings but in reality fall well short of great design. To cap it all off, this also marks the era of the most expensive to operate and least environmentally sustainable golf courses ever. There are certainly some great courses built in this time, but they are considerably outnumbered by some terrible designs on a scale the other booms just didn't see.
The late 90s and early 2000s saw people come to their senses when the likes of Coore-Crenshaw and Gil Hanse started pumping out sustainable designs with more unique natural layouts (Rod Whitman would be the Canadian equivalent). It is just a shame that the renaissance of a more traditional and sustainable approach to golf course design occurred at a time when there just isn't a demand for new courses.
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Also, what exactly is a Parkland course? A course with tree-lined fairways? Something more than that?
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In a word, yes. Links style is generally without trees (just think St. Andrews and courses like it), parkland has trees (think most of the classic American courses) and for a while it seemed like these were the only distinctions you would need to make to describe a golf course style.
I mean you can get very picky about it as some will distinguish between courses where the trees were planted to shape and line the golf course while others shaped the golf course through the trees and other little details. Then you've got your mountain courses, "heath" courses (which is technically the correct term for a 'links' course that is inland rather than on the water) etc.