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Golf is a refuge from the stresses of a hard day in the city.  The wide ample fairways offer a freedom unobtainable even in a large city park.  In fact, the golf course is in itself a park which reduces noise, heat, glare and dust.  A golf course is unlike public parks, it is paid for by those who use it, a landscape which provides tall trees, green grass and shimmering lakes as a background for those fortunate enough to play what has become the world’s most popular individual game.

The site of Emirates Hills is an excellent one with a great deal of natural character and an equivalent amount of golf potential.  I always look for the spirit of a site, what the Chinese call Feng Shui.  Once I have found it, I try to amplify it, to distill its essence and integrity, to expand its genius loci geomorphic ally ~ to magnify its earthen shapes ~ into a golf course with sweep and majesty.  In this way the community can also create a grand sense of place, with a powerful identity of its own.

As I worked on this design, I was looking for holes that could be matched with the other holes in an ordered yet adventurous whole, like movements in a symphony.  This deliberate orchestration looks, I hope, fitting and relaxed, as one hole flows into another, so that finally, as in any significant work of art, unity prevails.  I am continually searching for what psychologists call a gestalt, a work whose whole is greater than the some of its parts.  The course says to the golfer, “I want you to like me, but please don’t ever take me for granted”.

Genuine works of art must carry their own structural aesthetic within them and must, by their own force and conviction, create the standards by which they will be judged.

A great golf course must trap the energy of its deities and its human creators, the energy of its lakes and fairways, greens and hazards, tees and wild flowers.  There is a vast energy in the sum when you see it, the clouds when you don’t, the incessant winds, the memorable secrets of the sea.  We have some fine sand hills created by wind and weather and some flat land which needs work.  Out of the ordinary as has been said, we must create something out of ordinary.  When an original design is realized, it creates its own vigorous life locked in the secret stillness of this desert site.  

View each hole conceptualization below