Landfill Golf - the role of the Golf Architect

By Nigel Henbury, EIGCA Senior Member

When constructing a landforming project using inert soil recovery, the role of a golf course architect is not always as hands-on throughout the project as it might be. The staccato nature of the importation process, and the project management it requires, means the architect may be absent from the creative dynamic for significant periods. But it is worthwhile developers considering this carefully given the opportunities and relative freedom of creative expression landforming can provide.

At the feasibility stage there is little difference to a non-landforming project. The only major addition is ensuring the quality and quantity of materials will be available to import throughout the life of the project and the resources are in place to manage it.

These developments generally fall into one of three categories: landforming selected inter-fairway areas, allowing the course to remain fully open; closure of entire parts of the course for landforming in phases; or the landforming of a completely new development.

The first requires a lot of skill in transforming individual holes while maintaining the visual integrity of the original green formation and ensuring everything flows and is in proportion.

There is fantastic opportunity to create light and shade, giving dynamism to the slopes, but it is crucial to avoid the appearance of an engineered bund which would be an eyesore and can also create a legacy of drainage and maintenance problems.

The skill is in making formations appear entirely natural within the landscape.

Projects falling into the second category allow a holistic transformation of the original architecture, to heighten the experience of a venue and improve its visual appearance and landscape character.

Often this type of project is procured when courses, originally built to a serviceable budget, can attain tangible benefits from re-investment, using a method of project delivery which is self-financing.

The rarest projects are those falling into the final category. The key to a successful application – and only after due process in preparing an environmental impact assessment and environmental statement will there be tangible proof – is that a permission must enable and deliver a quantifiable and sustainable planning gain.

Correctly executed projects have succeeded in breathing new life into the accessibility and visual appearance of sites and recorded increased biodiversity.

Sites incorrectly managed during construction have brought criticism and intervention from both local authorities and the environment agency, but a recent review of statute at the end of 2008 has been derived to encourage stakeholders to work more cohesively to realise the engineering and creative objectives.

There is a preconception among a large number of people that landforming work simply allows the accommodation of soils to create new mounds and a few contours on existing sites. Actually, the required shaping work is rather more refined and the construction specification associated with that shaping can bestow vast improvements over the critical playing surfaces.

Efficiently phasing the delivery of the project will assist in gaining the specialist construction resources necessary and allow the golf course architect to manage the fine shaping of the design over the broad-brush GPS grading and carry out the fine construction.

If the surface of the imported soils does not mirror that of the final landform it can lead to difficulties with pipe-work installation during construction and later with ground settlement and spring-lines – but these are easily avoided with the correct specification and experienced management.

It is essential that developers recognise the importance of the architect, as a stakeholder in delivering the end product to the required standard, for it to work both technically and aesthetically.

Importing recovered soils into projects remains beneficial to developers and operators both technically and financially and every project of this type, properly executed, will stand the next one in good stead.

The economic climate suggests the incentive to build new golf courses will remain suppressed, on local, national and global levels, for quite some time, but during this period importation may well be the first model to kick start a recovery for golf.

This article originally appeared in Golf Course Architecture July 2009. Click here for further information.