Mark Rowlinson

Oddly enough, my path to architecture was due in many ways to my interest in golf, which I played competitively during high school. Seeing that the architecture class in my high school designed golf courses, I enrolled in the class, only to be assigned a house instead. Upon graduation, I chose a college with a good landscape architecture program as a step toward becoming a golf course designer, but I ended up loving buildings more than golf courses. Nevertheless, all these years later I still have a great appreciation for golf course architecture, even though I don't follow golf course developments as much as I used to and play only a few times a year — and not on courses as good as those collected in this book. Here is Pine Valley, Cypress Point, Augusta National, and other greats, but also some new ones (to me) like Whistling Straits, Sand Hills, and Pacific Dunes. That this little book provides maps of each course (just like the great World Atlas of Golf, from which some of its content is taken) is one thing that makes it a keeper. That said, I wish the book had a larger page size to make the maps more readable.… (meer)