<http://schema.org/articleBody>
" IN ARCHITECTURE, MANY CONNECTIONS ARE CALLED MOMENTS. The column meets a beam. That&amp;#039;s a moment. The roofline meets its peak. Another moment. When my brother Frank was an architecture student, we stood in a parking garage in Salt Lake City and he told me, &amp;quot;To get my license, I&amp;#039;d have to be capable of calculating every moment in this whole place.&amp;quot; I looked around. &amp;quot;How many moments is that?&amp;quot;  His eyes went wide. &amp;quot;Hundreds,&amp;quot; he said. &amp;quot;Maybe thousands.&amp;quot;  Since then, it&amp;#039;s been hard for me to see most average human structures as anything other than massive skeletons of stress points. The shopping mall. The highway overpass. My dentist&amp;#039;s office. One moment after another, one indistinguishable from the next. Even the average Golf course, where the premium would seem to always be on architecture and design, seems a mere string of calculations to me--sculpted rise, gentle berm, scalloped edges of the pond. The same mind-numbing visual language from one course to another. But then there are the great courses--Augusta, Pine Valley, Pinehurst No. 2, Pebble Beach, Sand Hills--each of which can be said to be singular and complete, a thousand decisions nestled inside one vision. On these courses, the level of calculation is a daily puzzle, one that takes a lifetime to sort out. Great courses are a moment unto themselves. As the great course falls into place, word gets out before it is even played. Right now, the word is that it&amp;#039;s happening in a little town in Oregon called Bandon, at a (public) course called Pacific Dunes, which opens this July. This is a moment that will begin there and then. It may be the last of its kind.  CLICH\u00C9 DICTATES THAT the world is shrinking. In the matter of Golf courses, this is surely so; the era of the great course is at a close. There isn&amp;#039;t enough suitable land left in the United States. Developers are properly hamstrung by land-use restrictions, environmental protections, zoning boards. Nor is there enough patience, or talent, or taste, to build them the way they ought to be built. Or money. Not to mention balls. You have to have some large measure of each to build a great Golf course.  Even as the fairways grow into their contours, even as the greens grab hold of the sand, even before anyone pays a penny to play it, Pacific Dunes looks ancient, as though it&amp;#039;s been there all along. It looks as though someone picked up the rug and found a Golf course, a course confidently featuring the four pillars of greatness--ocean, vegetation, contour, and wind--without relying too much on any one of them.  Pacific Dunes sits along a twenty-three-mile stretch of undisturbed Oregon coast, atop hundred-foot cliffs, in and amongst a tangle of gorse, sea grass, and sand dunes. This is the sort of place you&amp;#039;d stand for a look at the world--the dense blue ocean, the heaving surf, the whales, the crab boats, the distant points of sand and rock. It is a place both remote and connected, both distant and familiar, where nature and man press on in their various forms of commerce and decay.  You have to picture this land, beaten upon by the surf and the wind, a small river dragging sand to the ocean, the tides heaving it back up into mountainous dunes, which the Coos and Coquille tribes used for centuries as a meeting ground. When the loggers came, a homesick Irishman shipped in several gorse bushes to give the area an Irish flavor. The gorse, far from the cold and bitter soil of the British Isles, where it grows in low clumps, exploded, overtaking everything for sixty miles along the Oregon coast, until the area became a forest of the stuff, twenty feet deep in places, as dark and thorny as any medieval fairy tale.  Being able to build here at all, at this juncture in history, was a matter of patience and luck--that of owner Mike Keiser, who set out to build a great course and nothing less. He started looking in the late eighties, bought the Bandon property five years later, and took three years to get all the permits, variances, and trust needed to break ground. Keiser was in no particular rush. &amp;quot;Every time you start a course like Pacific, you have a chance to build a cathedral, something that will outlast us all. There&amp;#039;s no reason to rush. Plus, we literally couldn&amp;#039;t walk the land, it was so deep in the gorse.&amp;quot;  Things fell together. The strong economy. The decade-long Golf boom. The peculiarities of land-use restrictions for Oregon coastline. The surprising assent of the Indian tribes (who see the land as largely undisturbed by the low-impact design of Pacific Dunes). The demise of logging and fishing in the area (providing a town hungry for new jobs). Even the locals&amp;#039; hatred of the uncontrollable gorse. These were the X factors that allowed Pacific Dunes to move forward. But the catalyst was a brush fire that consumed four hundred acres of gorseland in late 1999, allowing Keiser and course designer Tom Doak their first real look at the lay of the land.  &amp;quot;The gorse was so deep, you literally couldn&amp;#039;t see anything before the fire,&amp;quot; said Keiser. &amp;quot;And then, suddenly, there was this Golf course right in front of us.&amp;quot;  Building the Golf course that was presented to them fit the aesthetic of Doak, who disdains heavy equipment and earth moving. He&amp;#039;s a smallish guy, infamously demanding in the matter of course design, who walks the course and plays it in the same pair of ratty work boots. As we play the course, his first time playing all eighteen holes in order, Doak points with pride to the places he didn&amp;#039;t work on and apologizes for those places he did. Again and again, he passes a delicate green site without comment, moving straight to an untouched dune, which he seems to know so intimately it might have a name.  &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s great moving the world around,&amp;quot; he says, studying a thirty-foot ridge of sand replete with the stubble of sea grass. &amp;quot;But all the equipment in the world couldn&amp;#039;t do this.&amp;quot;  WE&amp;#039;RE STANDING AT THE THIRTEENTH, facing the ocean, playing slowly through the holes at Pacific Dunes. When I ask Doak about making his mark on the game, he won&amp;#039;t bite. But when asked if the course will last, he is firm.  &amp;quot;There are seven holes which run directly into, or along, the shoreline in some way,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;Those are hundred-foot cliffs. I know there are greens which will fall into the water eventually. That&amp;#039;s happened at some of the Irish courses like Ballybunion. But the truth is, that kind of thing will be a lot of fun to deal with in a hundred years.&amp;quot;  This, too, is a kind of connection, a moment, this architect speaking to another architect, about this one place, a hundred years from now. The new hole suddenly seems, as great holes do, both intentional and accidental, as broad and permanent as the continent itself. To the west, the surf works the shore. To the east, a band of workers quietly pulls burnt stumps of gorse from the deep rough by hand. Doak tees it up. The wind picks up from the north. There is no hint of a different past, of a time when the hole wasn&amp;#039;t there, except for what I can read in the reaction of the workers, who crane their necks. Doak is the first guy they&amp;#039;ve seen playing the hole. They want a look. They want the moment to last. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/sports/a1031/esq0601-june-golf-rev/>