Golf Courses

Golf courses are highly controlled landscapes of turf and bunkers, heirs to the Scottish links and designed for ritualized leisure. Their upkeep demands obscene amounts of water - up to 400,000 litres of water per day in drought-prone regions such as Spain, while surrounding communities are urged to conserve. Sustained by intensive maintenance, they persist as theatres of privilege that frame recreation as necessity. In the Anthropocene, golf courses appear increasingly anachronistic: typologies resistant to change, ecologically detached, and reliant on picturesque ideals. For landscape architects, they serve as cautionary monuments—stylized and exclusionary spaces, destined to meet their overdue demise.

/ Urška Škerl

In the U.S., lawns cover nearly 2 percent of the land surface and, as researcher Cristina Milesi revealed using satellite data, “could be considered the single largest irrigated crop in America”—their total area is three times larger than that of irrigated cornfields. The infatuation with lawns runs so deep that, in some cases, failing to […]

/ Zaš Brezar

As we confront the growing ecological crisis, it becomes increasingly difficult to argue that harmonious aesthetics, designed primarily for pleasure and ease, are always the most effective mode of expression. Perhaps there is space to question whether ecological efforts demand a different aesthetic attitude, one less fixated on traditional notions of balance and spatial conformity and more open to dissensus and confrontation.

/ Zaš Brezar

Climate activists group Extinction Rebellion (XR) sabotaged multiple golf courses around Spain. Spain is currently facing a severe drought while the golf courses are still being irrigated. According to XR, Spanish golf courses use more water than Madrid and Barcelona together. They planted some shrubs and perennials directly into the golf course and set a […]

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Bruto landscape architecture recently lounched a new design trade mark BRUTOGOLF, which is dedicated to new and different golf course design. ”Designing golf courses is a challenge, both in a formal and in a conceptual sense. Especially, because we look at it from two angles, as landscape architects on one hand, and as golfers on […]

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