The greens are once again oversized at Engineers Country Club on Long Island. San Francisco Golf Club features a three-hole loop that had been missing for a half-century. Chattanooga Golf and Country Club has more Donald Ross character on display than it had in nearly a quarter-century. Next, with any luck, West Bend (Wis.) Country Club will reclaim the lost heritage on its back nine and match it with its classic front nine.

Throughout the country, there's a restoration movement afoot, with clubs getting a second chance at history. Since 2000, more than a quarter of the top 100 courses on Golfweek's America's Best Classic list have undergone or are in the
midst of restorations. Clumsy modernizations that undermined classic designs are now being plowed under, with architects this time aiming to go back to an earlier design heritage.

Names such as Ross, Charles Blair Macdonald, Seth Raynor, Alistair MacKenzie and A.W. Tillinghast are much in vogue these days as visionaries worthy of respect, admiration and meticulous restoration. A spate of detailed design biographies recently has been devoted to these designers. So-called "dead architect societies" determined to honor and help preserve their work have been formed and now carry the argument to board rooms across the U.S. that the handiwork of these masters deserves kid glove treatment.

The works of lesser-known designers also are getting attention – with artisans such as Herbert Strong, William Flynn, and the design team of William B. Langford and Theodore J. Moreau among those finding newfound respect.

Case in point: Engineers, a 1918 design by Strong in Roslyn, N.Y., immediately heralded for its vast, fascinating greens complexes and home to the 1919 PGA Championship and the 1920 U.S. Amateur. Gradually, tree clutter overtook
the grounds, the greens shrank, bunkers were taken out and a clumsy partial redesign by Frank Duane led to a new hole that was out of character. The hole was intended to replace Engineers' quirky but maddeningly difficult 90-yard par-3 14th, known as the "2 or 20 hole" because of the scores that were rung up there.

Lately, however, Engineers has enjoyed a restoration, a return to its original boldness, largely through the commitment of a series of recent green chairmen, the commitment of superintendent Donnie Szymkowicz and the research and design efforts of architect Tripp Davis. Davis, who played the Ben Hogan Tour
(now the Nationwide Tour) in 1989-90, is a reinstated amateur and a full-time course designer. He did detailed research on Engineers' design history, examined old photographs and conducted soil tests and probes of bunker lines and putting surfaces. He says the ongoing work at Engineers "still has a few holes to go," but
so far, the club has taken out 600 trees, rebuilt bunkers to their former depth and character, and recaptured greens, some of which had shrunk by more than 30 percent. And the "2 or 20" hole is back, fully restored.

At the 365-yard, par-4 16th, all that remained of the original 8,000-square-foot green was the back left sector, the front right and front left having been converted to fringe. By taking out some of the steep slope in the green, Davis was able to reintegrate the entire fill pad as putting surface, thereby reclaiming marginal hole locations that now make the 16th much more compelling.

In an effort to make some fairway bunkers more relevant, Davis said "I prefer to push tees back instead of moving bunkers," though he does admit to occasionally pinching them closer to fairways so that they are more in play. Like many restorationists, Davis says he doesn't believe length is what makes a course. Besides, he adds, "there's too much emphasis on challenge, and I'd prefer to focus on interest." That's the approach he's taking with his other restoration work at Meadow Brook Club in Jericho, N.Y. (Dick Wilson, 1955), Whippoorwill Club in Armonk, N.Y. (Donald Ross, 1925/Charles Banks, 1929) and Northwood Club in Dallas (William Diddle, 1948).

Throughout the 1960s to 1980s, it was commonplace for modern designers to put
their stamp on a golf course by "upgrading" or "modernizing" it, often with huge mounds, flowery bunkers, free-form tees, removal of cross bunkers, and elimination of blind shots. Short carry bunkers also were taken out, and new bunkers added at the 250- to 260-yard range to flank landing areas and protect tee shots not hit down the middle.

The paradigm for such work was the modernization of classic U.S. Open courses – practiced with great fanfare and publicity – by Robert Trent Jones Sr. The effort started with his reworking of Ross' Oakland Hills Country Club in 1951 and was part of Jones' commitment to remaking the future by turning his back on the past. By the 1960s, it had become standard practice among his fellow architects, a movement that gained credibility with clubs and green chairman who were looking to upgrade and modernize their courses.

Things started to slowly turn around in the 1980s. The 1981 publication of "The Golf Course" (in subsequent editions, called "The Architects of Golf") by course designer Geoffrey Cornish and journalist/researcher Ron Whitten focused newfound attention on design heritage and architectural identity. When the U.S. Golf Association brought the 1986 U.S. Open to Shinnecock Hills Golf Club in Southampton, N.Y., it showed that a classic links layout could test the world's best players.

Two years later at The Country Club in Brookline, Mass., for the U.S. Open, architect Rees Jones' sensitive reclamation of that course ushered the term "restoration" into the U.S. golf lexicon. Gradually, the lessons of classic design were subject to serious study and preservation.

A new generation of designers, including Tom Doak, Ron Forse, Gil Hanse, Stephen Kay, Ron Prichard, Brian Silva, Bobby Weed, Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw, also came along to adopt those lessons and to start salvaging, reclaiming and restoring classic golf courses.

Chattanooga Golf and Country Club was a Ross design from 1922, until a total modernization of the course in 1983 led to flowery bunkering, flatter contours, free-form tees and fairway shaping that didn't match the original design.

Under the supervision of course designer Bill Bergin, the course was shut down in January 2005. Nine months and $2.5 million later, it had all new greens and bunkers, 75 acres of new turfgrass cover, and its Ross character and bunkering restored.

Bergin doesn't claim that the work was a "pure restoration." He only had a few aerials and no Ross design plans to reference. But he was able to locate many of the bunkers in their original places, and adjusted some to adapt to modern distances while preserving the steep slopes and relative flat bottoms that Ross had created.

In some cases of restoration, entire holes that had been effaced have been reclaimed. The most drastic example of this can be found at the Tillinghast-designed San Francisco Golf Club, No. 14 on Golfweek's America's Best Classic
list. There, Tom Doak and his associate, Jim Urbina, literally brought back to life a three-hole loop, Nos. 13-15, that had been transformed and rerouted in 1950 when the club was making way for road expansion. As things turned out, enough property had laid unused that the original fairway corridors and green sites could be built more than a half-century later. There was plenty of aerial photo documentation available, and the holes reopened this June.

At West Bend Country Club, green chairman Mike McGuire figures he's sitting on a treasure trove, namely the original Langford-Moreau plans for his golf course. His club has a front nine designed by the Golden Age team that championed big, dramatic slopes and vaulted greens. Too bad that when the club finally got around to building a back nine in 1960, the designer they hired – David Gill – never even looked at the old plans. His golf holes featured flat greens and low-lying bunkers in marked contrast to the steep vertical elements of the original holes. According to McGuire, even when West Bend sought professional advice in the 1980s and 1990s, the two veteran architects they consulted never took more than passing glances
at the Langford-Moreau plans. Now the club has hired Prichard to do a master plan, and McGuire is urging him to take a serious look at adopting as much of the original design plans as possible.

When it comes to examining and implementing original design plans, few architects are more meticulous than Mark Fine. In a presentation of a proposed master plan to Cherry Hills Country Club in Denver, Fine made detailed historical comparisons of how each hole had evolved from the original 1923 Flynn plan. At a golf course that has hosted U.S. Opens and a PGA Championship, there is much documentary material available, and Fine's detailed show-and-tell was intended to help the relevant committees see for themselves how the original width and playing character of Flynn's design had been altered and narrowed over the decades.

The change was evident, for example, on the par-5 17th hole, where mid-fairway bunkers had been realigned over the years, and the island green became back-dropped by trees that completely altered the view and the impact of wind on the approach shot.

Such presentations require a lot of time, and most of the planning process in club restorations involves working closely with members and committees. But Fine has faith in the ability of clubs to see the genius of early designs.

"For all the emphasis upon length and getting more distance these days," he said, "the real genius that I'm interested in highlighting is how classic designers like Flynn defended par at the green."

Fine acknowledges that distance is needed, but that sometimes stretching a course leads to rerouting and to a compromise of its playing character. And for that, he's an unabashed student of classical design inventiveness.

"Savvy committees understand that," Fine said. "They get it, that you can make golf more interesting for members and still test the best golfers."

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Bradley S. Klein is a Golfweek senior writer. To reach him e-mail bklein@golfweek.com.