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Golf courses by the decade: a timeline of the evolution of architecture

All the great museums of the world, enriching as they are, share one common cardinal rule:

Do not touch the art.

We cannot feel the sturdiness of the marble Michelangelo used to craft his David. We cannot feel the brushstrokes that Da Vinci used to create Mona Lisa.

In the presence of priceless paintings, drawings and sculptures, all we can do is look.

Golf courses are the exception. Our own preferred art form is interactive by nature. Part of the charm of looking at a photo of 18 at The Old Course or 17 at TPC Sawgrass' Players Stadium Course is knowing that we can go there and play the course. We can touch the art.

And as in art, aesthetic trends in golf course design come, go and return over time. We are in the midst of a renaissance, where principles that marked the early days of American architecture - compactness, austerity of land manipulation, conscious nods to the ancient links of the British Isles - are coming back into vogue, albeit with the benefit of refined agronomy and maintenance technologies.

Each era of design has had its exemplars, embodied both by great courses and idiosyncratic ones that make architecture geeks scratch their heads. Here is a representative (if eclectic) mix of courses from each decade in U.S. golf history, including private and public access:

Pre-1900

A view from Myopia Hunt Club

1895: Van Cortlandt Park| New York, N.Y. - The country’s first public/municipal golf course, a Bronx borough treasure that’s still extremely popular and – get this - accessible via subway on the city’s No. 1 line.

1896: Myopia Hunt Club| Hamilton, Mass. - A quirky, quaint, scruffy looking gem designed by Herbert Leeds that was good enough to hold four U.S. Opens (1898-1901-1905-1908) and that at 6,539 yards today still challenges the best players with its mounding, steep bunkering and small greens.

1900s

One lucky threesome will get to tee it up at Oakmont, with proceeds from their winning bid going to the ForeBatten Foundation.

1903: Oakmont Country Club| Oakmont, Penn. - The first self-proclaimed American torture chamber of a golf course, it championed the cause of penal architecture. It’s tamer than it used to be, with the emphasis today on its slick greens rather than on its circa-200 bunkers – which used to number over 300 and were maintained with a deep furrowed rake, courtesy of one-hit-wonder founder and architect Henry Fownes.

1909: National Golf Links of America| Southampton, N.Y. - This curio cabinet of museum-piece architecture on the South Shore of Long Island was golf patriarch Charles Blair Macdonald’s way of honoring the Old World. He ad libbed from some of the best holes in Great Britain and France, placed it near one of the wealthiest enclaves of New York summer life, and in the process creating a mecca for generations of serious fans of golf architecture.

1910s

Pebble Beach first hosted the U.S. Open in 1972.

1919: Pine Valley Golf Club| Pine Valley, N.J. - Philadelphia hotelier George Crump sacrificed his fortune and, ultimately, his own life, in creating this idiosyncratic gesture of sand-strewn, punitive design in the Jersey Pine Barrens. Harry S. Colt finished the project, one that remains atop every compilation of great courses and every personal bucket list for anyone who worships classic design.

1919: Pebble Beach Golf Links| Pebble Beach, Calif. - There’s no greater meeting of land and sea than this figure-eight routing on bluffs overlooking the Northern California coastline. The original effort by Douglas Grant & Jack Neville has been much-enhanced by the likes of Alister MacKenzie, H. Chandler Egan and Jack Nicklaus. It remains a fascinating mecca for everyday resort goers while challenging the world’s best players via U.S. Opens every decade since 1972.

1920s

A sunny day view of the par-3 ninth at Yale Golf Course. The venerable layout is set to be restored to its Golden Age best by Gil Hanse.

1923: Winged Foot Golf Club | Mamaroneck, N.Y. - When the New York Athletic Club hired Gotham’s own, A.W. Tillinghast, they told him to build “a man-sized course.” Tillie responded with two epic layouts in suburban Westchester County, carved out of a rocky site and shaped with steep bunkering to create lasting tests of championship golf. Both his West and East Courses remain today impressive strategic achievements from an era when golf design was at its creative apex.

1926: The Course at Yale| New Haven, Conn. - The Roaring 20s were a time of unprecedented growth and prosperity in America, and it turns out that this decade produced a panoply of enduring courses. When it opened, this Charles Blair Macdonald/Seth Raynor masterpiece was one of the most expensive courses ever built, at a cost of more than $400,000. It was worth every penny, as more than 90 years later Yale is as awe-inspiring in its Gothic scale as an inland course in the world. Nobody who plays it fails to be impressed by its massive scale and thrilling mix of template holes and one-off marvels.

1930s

Lawsonia's Links Course in Green Lake, Wisconsin is a bucket list experience.

1930: Golf Courses of Lawsonia (Links)| Green Lake, Wisconsin - William Langford and Theodore J. Moreau aren’t household names, even for fairly avid golfers. But their phenomenal central-Wisconsin beauty is as good an everyday-public golf course as this country has. It can be walked for around $50 for much of the year, including the peak summer season. Playing the back nine as the sun sets over bucolic Green Lake is a spiritual golfing experience. They dabbled in deep-dish forms and stark angular mounding, and it’s all here: the best-preserved version of their Golden Age work throughout the Midwest that has otherwise been neglected, if not erased.

1932: Augusta National Golf Club| Augusta, Ga. - As the only perennial host of a major championship this co-design of Alister MacKenzie and Robert Tyre (“Bobby”) Jones stands as among the world’s most recognized collections of great holes. It was trend setting in its day for its sparse, strategic bunkering, its width and its deployment of reachable (in two) par 4 1/2s – called par-5s. It has been much changed over the years but remains impressive for its scale, terrain and impeccable quality of maintenance.

1940s

The Dunes Golf & Beach Club is one of the true classics on the Grand Strand.

1949: Dunes Golf & Beach Club| Myrtle Beach, S.C. - The "hard par, easy bogey" philosophy of the prolific Robert Trent Jones, Sr. came to dominate post-World War II golf course design, and the Dunes is one of its best examples. Short on tricks but long on shot values, the course has enjoyed a storied tournament-hosting history that includes elite events at the college, amateur and professional level. Drive it long and straight, hit it high and putt lights-out and you should be fine. And if you can keep your golf ball dry around the iconic par-5 13th "Waterloo" hole, even better.

1950s

A view from Prairie Dunes Country Club

1951: Oakland Hills Country Club (South)| Bloomfield Hills, Mich. - In a relentless rebuke of classical course design, Robert Trent Jones Sr. all but declared Donald Ross’ style of cross bunkering and offset hazards as obsolete. By moving all the bunkers to designated landing distances of 240-260 yards and placing them on the side of landing areas, Jones declared himself the arbiter of modern championship golf and thereby set himself as “the Open Doctor.” Equally important as Jones’ modernization was a long, laudatory article on the work and the Jones family published by Herbert warren Wind in the Aug. 4, 1951 issue of “The New Yorker.” It not only made Jones’ reputation; it also established Wind as the leading critic of course architecture.

1957: Prairie Dunes Country Club| Hutchinson, Kan. - Twenty years after Perry Maxwell’s design of nine ground-hugging holes (current 1-2, 6-10, 17-18) in the grasslands of this small central Kansas town, his son, J. Press Maxwell, seamlessly blended in an additional nine to create one of the game’s truly innovative 18-hole layouts.

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1960s

The superb conditions year round at Harbour Town Golf Links earned high marks from Golf Advisor raters in 2018

1961: Pine Tree Golf Club| Boynton Beach, Fla. - Dick Wilson, who worked with great Canadian architect Stanley Thompson, turned the profuse flanking bunkering and runway tees that marked "Dark Age" golf course design into high art. The tee box on the par-5 16th at this private club in Boynton Beach is 147 yards long. Sam Snead used to bet visitors that they couldn't hit a 7-iron from end to end. He cleaned up. Hogan called the course "maybe the best flat golf course in America." He's not far off; it's a wonderful example of post-war architecture.

1969: Harbour Town Golf Links| Hilton Head Island, S.C. - Pete Dye had begun to shake up golf course design with The Golf Club in Ohio and Crooked Stick in his native Indiana, but Harbour Town, being the centerpiece of the growing Sea Pines Resort helped to bring his singular style to the masses. It also launched the design career of one Jack Nicklaus, touching off the era where "Signature" designs attached to the names of leading professional golfers would be built by the score.

1970s

The fifth at Innisbrook's Copperhead Course is a long, up-and-over par five

1974: Innisbrook Resort (Copperhead)| Palm Harbor, Fla. - Larry Packard's sidewinding, sinewy Southwest Florida test continues to bite elite professionals with its relentless tee-to-green demands. The double-dogleg par-5 14th, a Packard template, asks players to shape the ball in both directions. It's hard to play around one's weaknesses here: you either have what it takes or you don't. That's a common refrain at championship courses of this era.

1974: Muirfield Village Golf Club| Dublin, Ohio - A brilliant routing by Desmond Muirhead created two counterclockwise loops through an expansive real estate development that works from high point (tee) to high point (fairway) across lows; and Jack Nicklaus’ characteristic attention to strategic detail and flawless manicuring culminated in one of golf’s most elegant championship-quality venues.

1980s

View from the 12th tee at Links at Wild Dunes Golf Links

1981: Wild Dunes Resort (Links)| Isle of Palms, S.C. - Don’t let the current surfeit of multi-until dwellings along the fairways obscure the elegance of the shaping. This is the layout on what was then-pristine maritime dunes and pines land that established Tom Fazio as a leading visionary of manufactured naturalism – in no small part due to the efforts of his newly-recruited lead shaper Mike Strantz.

1989: Shadow Creek Golf Club| North Las Vegas, Nev. - This is the paragon of “anything is possible,” Tom Fazio’s culminating achievement of creating powerful aesthetics and imagery on a barren site. It’s amazing what $37 million could achieve, though it wasn’t just the money spent but (also) the willingness of Fazio and his client, casino magnate Steve Wynn, to create lush panoramas on lifeless ground.

1990s

At LPGA International, Rees Jones took his penchant for mounding to new heights.

1990: Troon North Golf Club (Monument)| Scottsdale, Ariz. - Troon North helped accelerate the development of high-end golf in the desert surrounding the Phoenix/Scottsdale area, and it also helped institute the country-club-for-a-day model, where daily fee golfers started to be treated to perks like cushy locker rooms, personalized service, immaculate course conditions and triple-digit green fees. Architects Tom Weiskopf and Jay Morrish, who had considerable success in the last two decades of the century and the early 2000s, added to their successful Troon North debut with the 1995 opening of the Pinnacle Course.

1994: LPGA International (Jones)| Daytona Beach, Fla. - Rees Jones is famous (and infamous, in some cases) for a distinctive design style that favors bold mounding around the periphery of many holes, often creating an amphitheater effect. To overcome the dead-flat, otherwise featureless site he was given here, outside Daytona Beach, he took mounding to an extreme, running sometimes 10-foot-high berms of mound between holes to isolate them from one another. Large, amoeba-shaped bunkers abound, too. One, guarding the green of the par-3 14th hole, is several times larger than the putting surface itself. Think of it as the epitome of his design style.

1995: Sand Hills Golf Club| Mullen, Neb. - No course did more to reverse the entire history of golf design modernism than this remote private layout in the middle of Nebraska. Construction cost $1.1 million, three-quarters of it on irrigation. The place does fine without paved cart paths and offers accommodations not more elegant than Boy Scout camp. The design team of Bill Coore & Ben Crenshaw moved all of 5,000 cubic yards of dirt in teasing out this natural concatenation of native blow outs and prairie grass dunes.

2000s

A view from tee #13 at Pacific Dunes

2001: Bandon Dunes Golf Resort (Pacific Dunes)| Bandon, Ore. - Pacific Dunes, a stirring oceanfront layout by Tom Doak, helped consolidate the status of this southwest Oregon golf outpost. The universally acclaimed layout, with an uneven routing that includes four par 3s and three par 5s on the back nine, marked the start of steady expansions to the original 18-hole layout by David McLay Kidd from 1998. In quick succession Bandon opened up Bandon Trails by Bill Coore & Ben Crenshaw (2005), Old Macdonald by Doak and Jim Urbina (2010) and the 13-hole par-3 Preserve by Coore & Crenshaw (2013). With almost all of its 18-hole courses playing at or under 6,300 yards from the main set of tees, the resort proves that great golf can be fun, not taxing.

2006: Sebonack Golf Club| Southampton, N.Y. - In an unprecedented collaboration between two designers with totally antithetical design styles, Jack Nicklaus & Tom Doak combine on a dazzling waterfront site adjoining National Golf Links and Shinnecock Hills Golf Club to create one of the most exclusive private clubs in the world. The routing is by Doak, the strategy primarily by Nicklaus, and the greens incorporate Doak-intense contours on a Nicklaus scale.

The opulence of The Conservatory, juxtaposed with the dearth of built housing tells a great deal about the Recession's effect on golf.

2007: Hammock Beach Resort (Conservatory)| Palm Coast, Fla. - Y2K came and went, and as Tiger Woods continued to dominate professional golf, real estate developers spent themselves - and the American economy - into near-oblivion. Golf courses were built at a crazy rate before the Recession brought things to a screeching halt. The Conservatory opened practically on the eve of the bust. A long, intricate Tom Watson design (Watson, like many notable pros, got into the "signature" course design game during the boom) that ripples in decidedly un-Floridian fashion but nevertheless provides a fun round, the course was built to sell 143 homesites, of which a scant few sport completed houses more than a decade after its debut. Though The Conservatory was originally marketed as a tony private club, resort guests now benefit from huckster developer Bobby Ginn's excess.

2010s

The par-3 fifth at Streamsong Black is a great spot to take in the complexity of Gil Hanse's creation.

2017: Streamsong Resort (Black)| Fort Meade, Fla. - The opening of this Central Florida resort’s third course in 2017 confirmed Gil Hanse’s place as among the elite of contemporary design thanks to a vast but interesting playing field, replete with wildly contoured greens averaging 14,000 square feet and thoughtful placement of hazards relevant (but negotiable) for all classes of players.

2018: Inverness Club| Toledo, Ohio - The restoration of the original Donald Ross character (enhanced by A.W. Tillinghast) managed to eliminate all traces of the notoriously clumsy George & Tom Fazio renovation prior to the 1979 U.S. Open. Relatively unknown designer Andrew Green established a reputation for himself from a historically crafted master plan that paid homage to Inverness’ historic character in a path-breaking hybrid restoration.

What are your favorite American golf courses over the decades? Give your favorites a shout-out in the comments below!

Bronx, New York
Municipal
3.6934705882
915
South Hamilton, Massachusetts
Private
0.0
0
Oakmont, Pennsylvania
Private
4.8333
6
Southampton, New York
Private
0.0
0
Clementon, New Jersey
Private
5.0
3
Pebble Beach, California
Resort
4.9851833333
46
Mamaroneck, New York
Private
5.0
1
Augusta, Georgia
Private
5.0
5
New Haven, Connecticut
Private
4.45
7
Green Lake, Wisconsin
Public
1.9905666667
108
Myrtle Beach, South Carolina
Semi-Private
4.4286
21
Bloomfield Hills, Michigan
Private
5.0
4
Hutchinson, Kansas
Private
5.0
7
Boynton Beach, Florida
Private
5.0
1
Hilton Head Island, South Carolina
Resort
4.9808823529
83
Dublin, Ohio
Private
5.0
2
North Las Vegas, Nevada
Private/Resort
4.9286
14
Isle of Palms, South Carolina
Resort
4.3425
184
Scottsdale, Arizona
Semi-Private
4.6279117647
889
Daytona Beach, Florida
Semi-Private
4.2781882353
1678
Mullen, Nebraska
Private
5.0
1
Bandon, Oregon
Resort
5.0
33
Southampton, New York
Private
5.0
2
Palm Coast, Florida
Resort/Private
3.511
54
Fort Meade, Florida
Resort
4.8091647059
49
Toledo, Ohio
Private
4.9607882353
5

ArchitectureRoundups
Tim Gavrich is a Senior Writer for GolfPass. Follow him on Twitter @TimGavrich and on Instagram @TimGavrich.
Veteran golf travel, history and architecture journalist, Bradley S. Klein has written more than 1,500 feature articles on course architecture, resort travel, golf course development, golf history and the media for such other publications as Golfweek, Golf Digest, Financial Times, New York Times and Sports Illustrated. He has published seven books on golf architecture and history, including Discovering Donald Ross, winner of the USGA 2001 International Book Award. In 2015, Klein won the Donald Ross Award for lifetime achievement from the American Society of Golf Course Architects. Follow Brad on Twitter
6 Comments

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Great article with some thoughtful inclusions..Happy to see Prairie Dunes noted in the 1950's when completed, rather than 1937, when only nine holes designed by the great Perry Maxwell.

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Thanks, a very enjoyable journey. One of my favourites, Copperhead at Innsbruck needs a better representative picture. Nice to see Wild Dunes again, really enjoyed it, fine golfing area.
Congratulations on only using the “dark ages” once, I’ve grown to really dislike the phrase and attitude.
Will the plethora of Doak Kidd Coore Crenshaw Whitman Hanse style of walking only courses grow, or stall, the modern game? There is a great potential to develop a separate “Championship” group of courses for the Tours, different from great new fun courses, and old short classics.

Gary, sorry you didn't like the Copperhead photo. I played it last November prior to them overseeding, when the fairways were a firm, perfect green-tan. I wonder how much more interesting the course might be for the pros if the resort ever opted not to overseed prior to the tournament. As for your question about walking-only courses, I'd like to think that the notoriety they continue to acquire might encourage more people to walk their home courses. There is no doubt to me that it's better to experience a golf course on foot than in a cart. But golf carts are part of the business model for many courses, and many courses would not work without them, so here we are.

No mention of Bethpage for the 1930s? Seems like a key omission given its groundbreaking history in municipal golf and the unsurpassed quality of its courses for public everyday play.

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As I'm from Australia and live in Singapore, I haven't played much golf in the US. However, I'm very happy to see that Bandon Dunes is listed here. A great golfing paradise with so much more than just the four awesome 18 hole courses. The Preserve, the practice area and the Punchbowl really add to one's visit but you need to make sure you spend enough time at the resort in order to have the time to get to these facilities. To cap things off, the hospitality by all the staff really make this a must visit destination for any golf enthusiast.

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Golf courses by the decade: a timeline of the evolution of architecture