Golf Course Architecture - Issue 58 October 2019

76 ÅLANDS T he most important component in a top class golf course is usually the quality of the underlying land. Give the best architect in the world a flat farmer’s field on poor soil with no natural features of note and, despite all the earthmoving techniques at his disposal, he’ll struggle to produce anything better than good. Cypress Point is a global star because it was Dr MacKenzie who got to build it, but in truth even a less distinguished designer would have expected to do something pretty grand on that piece of land. The fundamental reason for this is that as humans we know what to expect in a particular location, and if something is too radically changed it is hard for us, emotionally, to accept it. Harry Colt famously told would-be designers to enhance and work up natural feature, but not too much. If we step on to a golf course and it is obvious to us that it bears no resemblance whatsoever to what surrounds it, it’s hard for us to get over this lack of authenticity: it can be done, as courses like Shadow Creek or Calusa Pines prove, but they are the exception that proves the rule. So the best way for an ambitious golf architect to build something stunning is to get his hands on a great piece of ground. In these days when most architectural work is focused on renovations of existing courses, this is harder to do. If another architect has had chance to work on a site before you, it’s likely that he will have found most of what makes it great, and you are restricted to tweaking holes for incremental improvements – still important work, but not the kind of thing on which a global reputation is made. Which is what makes the project currently going on at the Ålands golf club in Finland so unusual. The Ålands are an archipelago of over six thousand islands sitting in the Baltic Sea between Sweden and Finland. They belong to the latter, though they have a great deal of autonomy, but are culturally linked with the former – the islanders speak Swedish as a native language. The golf club has two courses, Slottsbanan (the Castle course) and Kungsbanan (the King’s course), both designed by the late Swedish architect Jan Sederholm from the 1970s. As one might expect in a group of small islands, the sea plays a large role in the site of the Ålands club, though one might be forgiven for not knowing this if one had only seen the club in its pre-project state. The Castle course, named after the medieval royal castle that sits atop the property, guarding the shore, occupied land that flowed along the banks of the fjord, but really