PGA Championship 2026: The real story behind the complicated architecture of Aronimink

Aronimink’s architectural history has always been a curious case. The club hired Donald Ross to build its golf course when it relocated to its new Newtown Square property west of Philadelphia in 1926. Ross was at the height of his career.

He was the profession’s busiest, most experienced architect with active projects across the U. S. Because he was so prolific, he leaned on associates in different regions—Walter Hatch, Walter Johnson, Frank Maples and others—to oversee the construction of his designs while he was not there.

Ross’ plans for Aronimink were explicit—his routing worked in an out of corners and used the site’s long slopes to build strategy in tandem with less than 80 hand-built bunkers cut into the terrain. He also left field notes—hole-by-hole instructions—for crews to reference when they were shaping. RELATED: The best courses in Pennsylvania, ranked The course opened in 1929, but during construction the bunkering changed dramatically.

Ross’s regular-sized bunkers were built as clusters of two or three smaller bunkers with lower faces, raising the total number to over 200. Ron Prichard, who was the consulting architect at Aronimink from 1994 through the last 2000s, believes that Ross’s associate and foreman, J. B.