大师 Tom Doak 在高尔夫建筑杂志发表的作品，我这里只是翻译了开头和结尾，鼓励大家学习英语，有问题，随时与大家讨论！中文翻译部分，仅供参考！

T H E  T R U E  V A L U E  O F  D E S I G N 
设计的真正价值

By Tom Doak

作者 汤姆 多克

Printed in Golf Course Architecture Magazine, Europe, January 2006
高尔夫球场建筑杂志，欧洲，2006年1月

When I first got the opportunity to work alongside Pete Dye, I would have worked for free just for the experience -- but back in the summer of 1981, I was paid the princely sum of $4.50 per hour to work on the crew at Long Cove. As skinny as I was back then, I probably wasn’t worth it.
当我第一次得到与皮特戴一起工作的时候，我是没有薪水的，仅仅是为了获得工作经验-但是若回到1981年的夏天，当我在long cove球场任职的时候，我的薪水是4.5美元每小时，现在看来，那时我可能并不值这个价钱。

To this day, I seldom think about the money when I’m actually working on a routing or out on a site. (I told my son when he was small that I design courses for free, but I get paid to travel.) I certainly never thought about it when I had the chance to work on my first solo design, or any day I spent on site at Pacific Dunes in Oregon; I felt like it would have paid for me to design those courses for free, because of the recognition they might bring and the opportunities they would create. Yet, I’ve got eight associates doing outstanding work who deserve to be rewarded for it; and as a more informed business person today, I now understand that we brought much more value to those jobs than I would have dared to ask for back then.
 今天，当我去访场时，我很少考虑钱的问题（当我儿子小的时候，我告诉他我给别人免费设计球场，但我能免费旅行）。当我第一次独立设计球场的时候，我从来没有想过钱的问题，在俄勒冈Pacific Dunes球场工作的时候，我更没有考虑过钱的问题，我想其将不会付给我设计费，因为他们会冒一定的风险，同时也会创造一定的机会。现在我已经得到了8个机构颁发的杰出奖项；如今作为一名更正式的商务人士，我明白了从一开始不敢要求，到现在我从这些工作中赢得了更多的价值。

The pricing of design services is one of the most complex problems I have tried to puzzle out. We all know that golf architecture is a very competitive business, yet the designers who charge the highest fees are by far the busiest, and everyone else scrambles for the leftovers. Prices vary tremendously from one region to the next because of local competition and local costs: for example, designers in the western USA tend to charge higher fees than those in the east or midwest, because those projects tend to entail bigger irrigation systems and more engineering and overall higher costs, and it only seems fair that designers are paid more to put in the time to deal with more details.

In early days, some of the great designers were amateurs who refused to take a fee for their labors, while others based their fees on a percentage of construction costs. The latter method makes sense from some perspectives, but since it also creates an incentive for the designer to add frills to the design and drive up his own fees, it is frowned upon by the professional societies and by some clients.

Today, a select few designers are paid fees amounting to more than a million dollars, not all of which is directly attributable to their design work. Part of their fees are justified by the value of their reputation toward selling memberships or real estate, and we should all be grateful, because their high prices have enabled the rest of us to make a healthy living while still appearing to be reasonably priced. (The irony is that the big names are priced out of competing to design on the best land for golf, because their name brand is of little value if the property is good enough to attract golfers without it.)

For the rest, fees are decided in a relatively uninformed open market, and competition from other designers ensures that few really get what their efforts are worth. Design fees are based vaguely on name reputation, but not really on value.

My first solo design, High Pointe in Michigan, provided a great lesson about the realities of the business of golf course development. My client at High Pointe was a novice in the golf business [or he probably wouldn’t have hired a rookie designer!], and when we talked dreamily about building a high-quality but affordable public golf course, I was enthralled with his good intentions. However, by the time the project was growing in, he was more of a realist about all the non-golf costs of getting a course opened, and he was being told by outside observers that his course would be better than those down the road. So, in the run-up to opening, the business plan changed from $45 green fees to $80, simply because it was thought that was what the market would bear. That price wasn’t sustainable in what is now a very competitive market, but because the costs of construction were not high, the original client still owns it 18 years later. My lesson was that golf course architects are not the only ones whose fees are determined by a competitive market; our clients are equally at the mercy of their competitors, because green fees and membership fees are determined not by cost of construction, but by the course’s place in the market and by the price the golfer will bear, which are hard to predict.

Ultimately, none of the pricing systems in place are good for the game of golf. In America, most developers now choose a high-end private-club model so they can sell out sooner and minimize their risk, instead of keeping the course public and taking a long-term chance on its economic future. By insisting on our fees up front, we designers share the responsibility for that trend.

Surely, our clients assume most of the risk and so they ought to reap most of the reward. The client has a hand in how the course is run and how it is marketed, and it is enormously important to make good decisions on what property to build on, and how much to invest in an appropriately-sized clubhouse. What we as designers bring to the table is experience – more specifically, our perspective on the cost vs. benefit of the decisions we make in our designs. If golfers are willing to pay more because they love a course, and the cost of construction was relatively low, the client makes a windfall; but if the course is only perceived as average and the cost of construction was higher than the competition, then the owner will eventually sell the course at a loss, or go through bankruptcy.

From that perspective, the current lump-sum fee structure used by most modern designers is poorly designed. I am now experimenting with a different protocol, whereby some part of the fee would be made as royalty payments, based on the success and profitability of my courses. It’s a perfect model for a project in a remote location, where the client has to be pessimistic about the potential for profits because success depends on people coming from afar. If the course isn’t critically successful, it won’t be commercially successful either, and I won’t get paid extra for the design; but if it is very successful, the client will owe me more, and he’ll be happy to pay because it will come out of the profits of operation.

To make such an agreement, you have to have enough faith in your ability to be willing to bet on yourself, and you have to trust the client to live up to his end faithfully. But the potential reward is substantial: annual royalty payments from a handful of courses would be enough to fund one’s retirement. In the process, you just might help to make a great project happen which would otherwise never get built.

I would also urge everyone to think about the real value of a great design. We all know that a golf course raises property values, but a great golf course raises them more. We’ve recently done projects where the land costs far exceeded the cost of golf course construction … but the client’s ability to charge sky-high membership fees to pay for the land still rests in large part on the success of our design. There is a big picture here, and we are the ones who are painting it.
我也想别人考虑下伟大设计的价值。我们都知道一个高尔夫球场会增值，但是一个高尔夫球场给他们带来的会更多。我们最近完成的几个项目，其土地的价格远远超过了球场的建造费用，但是我们的可以用天价的会员费用支付土地费用，很大一部分都是依赖于我们设计的成功。哪里有一副巨大的景象，我们就是在哪里正在绘画的人！

Why am I telling you all of this? As someone once said, “a rising tide floats all boats.” The more other designers make for their creative efforts, the more we will make for our own.
为什么我要告诉你们这些，就像被人说的，“水涨船高”。其他设计师的创造性的努力越多，我们就的回报就越多！