It’s fashionable for architects to speak of “finding” holes in the topography.
There were no holes—or much of anything else—to be discovered on the 320-acre
parcel of barren desert 10 miles north of the Vegas Strip that is now Shadow
Creek. A golf course existed solely in the considerable imaginations of
designer Tom Fazio and owner Steve Wynn.Fazio dug into the desert to
manufacture an ecosystem of sorts, creating hills, canyons, lakes and streams,
planting 21,000 trees, exotic plants and flowers, and importing wild turkeys,
swans and wallabies—all for a cool $40 million.
Shadow Creek, which debuted
in 1989 amid hype that even Donald Trump would envy, might be golf’s greatest
fabrication, but it’s an inspired design. On an empty canvas, Fazio composed a
perfectly paced routing of well-complemented holes, building to a dramatic
finish.
