Members Buy Boston Golf Club

Carol Britton Meyer of the Hingham Journal reports the good news that the members have saved Boston Golf Club from a possible outside purchaser, likely assuring the low-profile Gil Hanse design remains in its current rustic form.

There had been rumors that a certain developer known for his hair and buying distressed properties had looked at BGC as a possible acquisition.

Grounds For Golf Now In E-Book Format, $6.99

I'm pleased to say that not only has my primer on course design been reborn in an e-pub format available on Amazon or in the iTunes store, but Gil Hanse's renderings and the other illustrations/images have survived in the e-edition.

And all for $6.99, about $232 less than the used copies have been going for since the book went out of print last year.

Golf Digest Podcast: Olympic Design Derby In Review

You can always subscribe at iTunes and have Golf Digest's podcasts download right to your device, or you can listen in here as Sam Weinman and I spend about 15 minutes discussing yesterday's Olympic design announcement.

Listen to the podcast

Hanse's "Picturesque" Landscape Comment

I noticed on comments here and in other discussion threads that a few folks stumbled when reading Gil Hanse's press release reference to a "picturesque landscape" for the Rio Olympic course design. It was not a frilly reference to golf course theatrics, but in fact, an homage to an aesthetic approach to landscape design espoused by figures like Humphry Repton, John Ruskin and Frederick Law Olmsted, and an influential philosophy on golf architects Alister MacKenzie and C.B. Macdonald.

If interested, you can read up about the picturesque school at Wikipedia.

And as for that picturesque landscape, it might be easier to visualize the Hanse design for the site by looking at this overlay of map and aerial photo posted on Hanse's site.