It was designed to look as if it were rising out of the ground. The idea was to make Winged Foot’s clubhouse part of the essential backdrop to the greens closest to the famed building. Golfers approaching on the ninth and 18 holes of the West Course, as well as those hitting into the 10th and 18th greens on the East Course, get a view of the famed stone structure that makes it seem integral to the holes they are playing.
That’s exactly what architect Clifford Charles Wendehack (1885-1948) had in mind when he collaborated with golf course designer A.W. Tillinghast on Winged Foot Golf Club in the early 1920s. The two architects achieved this by careful site selection and alignment of the building. So closely did they work together on sight lines and design that when Wendehack published his now-legendary masterpiece on clubhouse design, “Golf & Country Clubs” (1929), he sent a copy to “Tilly” with this note: “To the distinguished course architect – A.W. Tillinghast. From his most humble co-worker. C.C. Wendehack April 5, 1930.”
In a way that has never been fully appreciated by the golf design world, the two architects led parallel lives, achieving creative heights during the 1920s with work that was particularly prominent in the New York City Metropolitan area. Both wrote extensively for golf publications and design magazines, using their literary output to publicize their craft and to generate work. Both faded into obscurity in the mid-1930s, though Wendehack’s denouement was not as sad and as broken as Tillinghast’s. If Tillinghast’s story is now well known, Wendehack’s is not. But understanding him and his work helps a visitor to Winged Foot appreciate the iconic nature of the clubhouse as a landmark in American architecture.
A New York native, Wendehack apprenticed for nine years in Manhattan under a master of the elaborate Beaux Arts style of architecture that celebrity architects such as Stanford White had parlayed into the dominant Met-area style. A trip to France, Italy and England exposed Wendehack to more traditional styling, and by the time he set up shop with offices in Montclair, N.J., and Manhattan, he was a chief proponent of a less embellished, more structurally integrated style derived from Tudor Revival.
This watercolor image was created by Clifford Wendehack himself in 1925 and faces No. 9 on the West Course. (Winged Foot)
Most of Wendehack’s design work focused on residences. Among the many owners of Wendehack-designed houses in New Jersey was renowned golf course architect Robert Trent Jones Sr., who bought a 4,100-square-foot Tudor house in 1959 in Montclair, N.J., that had been designed in 1928. Jones maintained his residence and an office there for four decades.
The most distinctive examples of Wendehack’s clubhouse design in the strict English Scholastic style of Winged Foot are at Mountain Ridge Country Club, in West Caldwell, N.J.; Ridgewood Country Club, in Paramus, N.J.; The Park Country Club of Buffalo, in Williamsville, N.Y.; and North Jersey Country Club, in Wayne, N.J. He also did more relaxed versions in a countrified manor house style at Forsgate Country Club (Monroe Township, N.J.), Hackensack Golf Club (Oradell, N.J.), North Hempstead Country Club (Port Washington, N.Y.), Douglaston Park Golf Course (Queens, N.Y.) and Bethpage State Park (Farmingdale, N.Y.).
For all the books focusing on golf architecture from the interwar period known as the Golden Age of Course Design, Wendehack’s “Golf & Country Clubs” is the only one devoted to clubhouses. Indeed, it remains not only an essential volume but the only book focusing on the special character and schematic structure of these buildings.
US Open Release, Sep 13, 2020
