GIL HANSE – TPC BOSTON ARCHITECT
Known as one of the best traditional golf course designers in the country, Gil Hanse of Hanse Golf Course Design, Inc. collaborated with PGA TOUR player consultant Brad Faxon on a re-design of TPC Boston’s already proven layout in 2007 designed to make the course blend more naturally with its New England setting.
A protégé of noted golf course designer Tom Doak, Hanse was the recipient of the prestigious William Frederick Dreer Award during his studies at Cornell, which allowed him to spend a year in Great Britain studying the earliest examples of golf course architecture. While there, he interned with the firm of Hawtree and Son, the oldest continuously practicing golf course architectural firm in the world. These experiences had a profound influence on Hanse’s design philosophy, which focuses on preserving and protecting the integrity of the land, maximizing the natural characteristics of the terrain and minimizing human impact on the landscape during construction.
Hanse became only the third American architect to build a course in Scotland when he created Craighead Golf Links, which opened in 1998. Other notable designs include South Fork Country Club in Amagansett, Long Island; Tall Grass Golf Club at Shoreham on Long Island; Inniscone Golf Club in Avondale, Pennsylvania; and a new golf development underway on Vancouver Island, among many others.
“The (new design) now has the illusion of antiquity…TPC Boston looked great on television this year: shaggy, gnarly and old-looking. In person, it was even better: beautiful to behold, delightful to play. This was a refinement and enhancement of a course whose basic structure was sound, not a total renovation or wholesale replacement.” – Ron Whitten, Golf Course Architecture Editor (2007)