china Kruse Control

Two graduates from the Greg Norman School of Golf Architecture, eager to market their services in Asia, have picked up their first commission.

Bob Harrison and Harley Kruse have been selected to design an 18-hole course for Fanjing Mountain, a to-be-built community in Tongren City, China. The community takes its name from an 8,400-foot peak that once served as a sacred place for Buddhists but is now mostly a vacation spot.

The partners, who created Harrison & Kruse Golf Design late last year, each served as the lead architects in Norman’s now-closed design office in Australia. Darius Oliver of Planet Golf has praised their work, contending that they offer “the experience and skills of Norman's former design team without the excessive signature design fee.”

The duo won the bid in China from an unnamed development group earlier this year, in a competition against at least three U.S. architects. For now, Kruse won’t provide any details about the project because, he wrote in an e-mail, “the client is going through sensitive planning process.”

The government's crackdown on golf construction isn't helping, either.

On a related issue, Kruse is clearly under-whelmed by China’s current golf offerings. “I think there is a growing awareness,” he said in a recent interview with Planet Golf, “that of the courses developed during the past 20 years, only a handful were truly world class. I am now hearing a few Chinese golf industry people say that if we are to create better golfers in China, we need better courses.”

Tongren City is in Guizhou Province, roughly 200 miles southeast of Chongqing.