Blank Slate... Manufactured Golf

The Biariz Hole at Yale

If you had a site such as a Bayonne or a landfill/toxic site that required 100% fill. You had to completely manufacture a golf course from your imagination, no help from a single natural contour. Imagine it was dead flat and square.. Import the soils of your choice. What kind/theme/style/motif/project statement would you choose?.. Money is always an issue.

Obviously the tendency, at least from what I have seen, is to call it a links course and build rounded mounds with fescue and retention ponds. I played a 9 holer in NJ like that yesterday, which got the wheels turning.. Bayonne, Shadow Creek, Lido, Ferry Point (under progress) are other examples of possibilities.

What I would do:
Using a combination of CMB and Tilly templates along with some templates of my own I would build using a loose geometric style.

Why:
Its guaranteed.. These golf holes are proven to be fun, playable, exciting, easy to build, cheap. I'm not talking taking specs from Yale a gps-ing a short hole in, I have my own thoughts on yardages, and I'm going to spend all my time on green contours.

If you are going to manufacture golf on a blank slate, it will always feel manufactured. So don't hide it, use it to your advantage and use the fill in a way that affects the golf course most. Golf courses are no place for decoration (unless natural).

I love the big and the bold. Its a personal preference. And easily transferable to a lose geometric style.

Routing.. templates, out of 100% fill, you can do a lot more planning ahead of time to get better estimates and models. Also easily tweakable.

I feel pretty confident that I could manufacture something extremely fun, certainly memorable, challenging and definitely economical/efficient in construction.