Striking the balance between originality and environment protection.
A golf course must allow the long-term conservation of biodiversity, landscapes and cultural and historic heritage.
Future golf course developments will be a moral reflection of our human and professional commitment to our descendants and the inheritance we will leave them.
With my background and desire to make progress, I design the architecture of golf courses for tomorrow. The experience must go beyond sensory culture and extend to the energy created by the landscape.
Designing and creating a golf course landscape is much more that designing a living space.
Thus, the golf course project as it emerges out of the lines traced by my pencil intermingles emotions and action, without ever revealing shapes or limits in an immediate or conscious way.
My restless spirit wanders along with my thoughts, allowing the surreptitious emergence of the first contours of the project.
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years of experience in designing golf courses
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golf courses concerned
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holes of living experiences
Approach
A protected ecosystem
Mother Nature can be generous, if you know how to approach her...
Seeing and discovering the golf course is a way to get away from the routine.
As a designer, my imagination makes a contribution, and naturally includes all the sensations that make up the concrete reality of human presence on our planet, regardless of the location, thus defining the varied exchange between people, their societies and their landscapes.
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Latest completed projects
Close up of:
International golf course in Roissy
Looking forward into the future of this sport and leisure means more than flattering golfers. The ambition is to develop action directed towards all the social and economic strata of the population, by offering amenities that provide pleasure above all, and make the game easier and more enjoyable.
Such action, equipment and other aspects are present in Roissy.
Building while protecting nature in the International golf course in Roissy
Collecting, storing, treating and cleaning up rain water and runoff that is polluted by human activity with the help of plants before it is used for watering the course.
Protecting the soil and the two water tables present, by applying waterproofing under the greens and thus preventing risks relating to product spills. Creating golf course forms that prefer valleys and low points where runoff water is recovered.
Using grasses that need little water, and are more resistant to drought and disease.
Recovering rainwater running off buildings and roads.
On the Pitch & Putt, which is used by a large number of players, using starting points and greens in synthetic material that is derived from recyclables at the end of their life. The benefits of such materials are indisputable, because of the quality of products and techniques developed to create sensations similar to those of a natural green.
Protection of listed wooded areas. Protection of listed EBC wooded spaces.
Protection of sensitive archaeological areas by doing away with any excavation in these areas.
Rewilding the concreted stream for the flow of recovered rain water.
Conserving the fauna and flora and recycling water
Creating support walls in matched riprap that limit useful spaces to backfilled areas, and create habitats that can support common wall lizards (threatened species) and insects, and a great diversity and variety of plants.
Reintroducing threatened species, such as pipistrelle bats and dusky large blue butterflies.
Creating a series of tanks for phyto-purification, in order to clean up rain water and runoff before it is recycled for watering. Paths are provided to allow children and other visitors to discover this natural process.
Planting of large numbers of trees and bushes. These will be planted in the form of hedges throughout the site.
The creation of public footpaths in the Green Valley, by greatly increasing the existing availability, while protecting the safety and tranquillity of each user.
Arrangement of rest areas, view points and picnic areas for a wider public, in accordance with safety and tranquillity distances.
More than designing a golf course.
Discovery
The golf course in Villenave Bordeaux
This golf course is exemplary because of its particularity of taking account of and remedying the shortage of flooded areas created by the creation in the vicinity of a rail-road interchange by RFF (Réseaux Ferrés de France); this public utility structure is located in an area upstream from the golf course.
A project that serves the interests of the community and golfers alike
The challenge taken up by Michel Niedbala was to include, in the golf course design, the creation of flood areas with a retained water volume of over 100,000 m3, to make up for the losses resulting from the aforementioned creation of the intermodal interchange by RFF.
These flood areas (low points), which cover over 25 hectares, have been designed in the shape of wet and semi-wet spaces that act as true sponges that pick up and retain water, and then let it flow out slowly into the Garonne, thus avoiding saturation and flooding, protecting lives and livelihoods located upstream.
To control and return water downstream to the Garonne, two tide gates (structures located on the dyke) were created to let out or hold back water in the golf course. These shut at high tide and open at low tide, thus releasing measured quantities of water.
It is one more demonstration that a golf course designed to serve the general interest of the local area can be extremely useful.
The golf course is located in a Natura 2000 zone, and is strictly monitored by a number of governmental agencies as part of permissions and commitments relating to environment protection.
Travel
To the Dolomiti Golf Club
In 1995, this project enabled me to develop designs that proactively and resolutely addressed aspects relating to the environment and the ecology of the area.
The Trentino region drew on those designs to include them in a new environment protection law relating to such projects.
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