It's already time to start preserving modern courses

Last fall, Harbour Town Golf Links on Hilton Head Island reopened after a renovation by Love Golf Design, the firm of Mark and Davis Love III and lead architect Scot Sherman. The work, which was on display during the recent RBC Heritage, involved new drainage and irrigation, expanding lost green space, rebuilding bunkers—normal things that all courses need to do every 20 years or so. There was another element, one that introduced a new aesthetic: The conversion of a dozen or so bunkers to artificial, stacked sod-wall faces.

The resort termed the project a “restoration” of the original Pete Dye course that opened in 1969 and stands as one of the architect’s landmark early creations. While Dye did attempt to construct natural sod-faced bunkers, he gave them up by the early 1970s and never chose to reinstall them across the numerous occasions he personally renovated the course over the next 40 years. For 95 percent of Harbour Town’s life, they didn’t exist.

Whether reviving an idea the original architect quickly abandoned counts as restoration or editorial liberty is open to debate. But it does bring up an important question about how architects and memberships should handle renovations of contemporary designs.

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So far, most of the tinkering that’s been done to Dye’s courses was done by him. But since he passed in 2020, memberships and resorts require outside guidance when renovation work is needed. They will have to decide whether to preserve Dye’s distinctive and often groundbreaking architecture or go in new directions. The same questions will eventually apply to the best courses from active designers like Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw, Tom Doak, Gil Hanse and Jim Wagner and others. Will subsequent architects be caretakers of these legacy designs and resist the urge to put their own imprints on them, even under the premise of improvement? Or will they be used as canvases for artistic reinterpretation?

The reason there is even a concept of “restoration” is because clubs began hiring a new generation of architects to modernize their existing layouts in the years following World War II. Those courses from the 1910s and ’20s needed refreshing and benefited from advances in turf and irrigation technology, but mid-century outlooks (stretching into the 1970s and ’80s) felt little obligation to honor the original design ideas. Historical conservation was not a concept. In almost every case the work of Donald Ross, A.W. Tillinghast, George Thomas and their contemporaries was altered in the name of progress and the whims of the times. As one architect said to me about an elder practitioner who became prominent for remodeling old courses during the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s, “He was a great guy, but he did a lot of damage.”