FOREGROUND: The Landscape of Golf in America
Most sports are played on rectangles of consistent dimensions, and can be pursued almost anywhere, even indoors. Golf’s field of play is irregular in form, and defined by features of the outdoors, such as grass, trees, sand, mounds, and water. Golf is a sport played on, and with, a landscape. Golf courses are romantic, evoking notions of a pastoral sublime. They are also site-specific, distilling scenic qualities of the place where they are. In this way golf is a celebration of the diversity of the American landscape. Primarily, though, golf is a landscape reduced to a functional stage, a simplified vista, serving the needs of the sport. Golf is an assertion that nature can be thoroughly tamed, sculpted, and placed under control, so long as it can be maintained.
2015 CLUI Research Project