Golf Course Architecture - Issue 63, January 2021

53 Canadian golf course architect Christine Fraser surveys a prospective site in Ontario T hat most golf designers, through the history of the profession, have been men isn’t wholly surprising. In the early part of the twentieth century, when golf course architecture emerged, most members of most professions were men. Among the first women ever to get seriously involved with course design were the leading British amateur Molly Gourlay, who worked with Tom Simpson on a number of projects, and her American colleague Marion Hollins, the brains behind the development of Cypress Point in California. Hollins, it is claimed, convinced Alister MacKenzie to build the famous par-three sixteenth at Cypress Point by teeing up a ball and proving that the carry was achievable. In the near hundred years that followed Gourlay and Hollins, though, very few women have practiced golf course architecture, and one of the only women who is listed as the main designer of a course is a signature name – Annika Sorenstam. It is in this way that golf design has diverged from other professions, which, even if they are not now equally divided between men and women, are certainly much closer. Buildings architecture, for example, has made significant strides in this regard in recent years: figures from the RIBA Journal indicate that in 2018, 28 per cent of architects were female, but women made up 44 per cent of new entrants to the profession that year. Golf architecture, of course, is a much smaller profession, and there are far fewer opportunities for people to join the business (it may be noted too that golf architects seem to be very Photo: Jeff Mingay