Arcadian greens.

For this golf club, assembled around a striking red club house in the lush fields of Northern Ireland, the architects have created richness from a modest brief.

With some exceptions, such as moderne resorts of the 1920s, or the stacked practice batteries of urban Japan, golf and architecture have had an unradical coexistence. In these islands, golfers appear to prefer the past and a priori notions of comfort to anything experimental. The Blackwood Golf Centre upsets that. Blackwood neither regurgitates the bungalow as mission control, nor presents a decor of aspiring squirearchy. It strikes a contemporary stance in a fine if troubled landscape and offers users an environment of complex interactivity.

First and foremost, one sees red. The context is the nineteenth-century estate of Clandeboye. Clandeboye, near Belfast, is being nurtured with an aspiration and flair that augurs well for Northern Ireland. The immediate site is a new public course rising gently to the south. Approached down a winding tree-lined lane, the club house pops into view as a striking swatch of colour, a vivid presence of pigment reminiscent of Italianate villa's (perfected villages) and Irish agrarian construction. Closer to, Blackwood separates as a concatenation of tiny buildings, cubic pavilions of Pompeian render, cedar sheeting and terne-coated steel.

Rather than foregrounding the fancy bits (the dining room, the nineteenth hole) and leaving the lockers and storage and parking areas on the periphery, architects Sheila O'Donnell and John Tuomey have articulated all segments of the programme. The two dozen stalls of the driving range, (usually pushed 'out of harm's way') become the principal constituent of the total assemblage, arcing out across the terrain under a thin metal roof to operate as a kind of haphazard missile machine. Above them stand the houses with various internal functions; then behind that, on the slope, is a series of terraces to accommodate cars. The car park is considered, as is the practice range, as part of a new landscape, geometric inscriptions softened by foliage and fragments of wall.

From the car park, the driving range is invisible, screened by the miniature fort of the red and timber buildings. Visitors are collected along a gravelled route to puncture the construction between a welcoming monopitch and a headpiece facing west. A narrow chamber with bevelled ceiling is then immediately pierced on its transverse axis and the visitor is repositioned above the sunken roof of the driving range. The north-south section is thus about cut and fill, cutting the practice stall into the earth - like a ha-ha - and filling up behind to make a generous viewing terrace.

From west to east, the progression of forms is as follows. First, a tall double-storey veranda containing bar and restaurant, in effect the headpiece looking towards the eighteenth green. Second, the extruded chamfered hall, with isolated viewing booths resembling cave-like oriels punching on to the terrace. Against that, the monopitch originally intended for fee collection, but now a VIP room. Next, an introverted cedar cabin for showers and changing, with clerestory lighting along its perimeter. Finally, the lone booth of the professionals' shop and security office. A thin bridge leads to the first tee. Below, from the southerly yard, a tunnel leads from storage areas to meet a gently descending ramp and stair and access the practice stalls.

O'Donnell and Tuomey's pavilion village, a typological hybrid, is appropriately called the Golf Centre - its plan is focused, magnet-like, about the looping rounds of golf. The golfer's path to the first tee, and back from ninth to the tenth, is along the gravelled terrace, a chicane with a view, which is also inlaid with railway sleepers. There is a tension between the analytic integrity of the total programmatic relocations have disturbed the particularity of certain pieces - and its synthetic looseness, a distinctive, touchy essence both in the planning and component details. It is interesting as architecture, but one wonders how it might grow, both metaphorically and actually. An original intention to add small structures for overnight accommodation seems excessively busy. Volumetrically the architects have created richness from a modest brief, intuitively relying on natural setting. Blackwood is an almost too beautiful thing, a sophisticated collage for sport and relaxation. It sets the standard for Arcadian leisure.