Forrest:
I'll tell you exactly why Jonathan with zero experience might have "boohooed" to his friend many of the suggestions of Hurzdan and Fry as the two of them spent a lot of time walking the raw site.
Jonathan, just like the majority of us armchair architects out here in Internet land at our computers participating on Golfclubatlas, said he had and has no practical experience on site. But that definitely does not stop any of us from having all kinds of ideas on concepts and such to do with architecture.
We're probably like little kids who see endless possibilities with architecture simply because we don't really know any better due to lack of practical onsite construction experience.
Frankly, I view that as a really good thing and something that a bunch of architects should take note of more often and filter some of it through their experienced practical experience. If they did it might give them some fresh ideas to take some chances with.
I already mentioned on this thread about Geoff Shackelford at Rustic preconstruction and some of his ideas having spent so much time trying to identify useful natural site interest for golf and design.
I spent a couple of days out there on site with him before anything was done. The first day the two of us with no practical onsite construction experience just walked around talking over the refining the possiblities of the routed and semi designed holes (independently by Shackelford and Hanse BTW).
The following day Jim Wagner, a guy with plenty of practical onsite experience from Hanse and Co. joined us as we went over a few of their nuancy hole ideas.
It was a really great day I think. Here are two guys with no practical construction experience and lots of free floating ideas from our experiences in golf and architecture in other ways with a guy who understands exactly the practical possiblities and practical limitations of getting things into the dirt, apparently having a great time saying; "Can do, no can do, or even, interesting let's figure out how we could do that."
To me, I can't see how it can get any better than that. It may even be one of the reasons that some of the initially raw amateur architects such as Crump and Hugh Wilson were able to translate some new, raw, unique and untrained and untried ideas into some real possibilities in design.
It's a great combination and collaboration I think, because as experienced as you guys might be we're the players, the real observers of finished products, the true user critics, so to speak. Sometimes I wonder and even fear that some really good architects get a bit too wrapped up in practicalities, formulaics and such and need to open their minds more to other raw ideas.
Of course, any of us must defer to you all in things like construction practicalities, experience, things such as potential liabilities and basic architectural common sense. But I think some of you all should listen to some of our conceptual ideas and run them through that sort of collaborative "can do, no can do, or that's interesting lets see how we can develop that novel idea" process like Jim Wagner did at Rustic.
I've been out on the sites of some of today's architects who might be termed the onsite creative side of the art or golf architecture today and there's a lot of differences of opinon, complaining, bitching and moaning and basic freedom of expression--and frankly the entire atmosphere is wonderful--it's creative and it seems to create natural freedom of artistic expression. Obviously eventually it will all filter through practical experience of the ones who have that.
But a couple of years ago I was talking to a young potential talent on the crew of one of the famous high production architects who said the stultifying atmosphere of the by the book and by the computer planned designs of that company was getting to him because there was almost zero freedom of expression.
I'm sure you know where I'm going with all this. There's no question at all how limited and inexperienced most of us are with practical onsite (and otherwise) construction experience but nevertheless you guys who have it should listen to some of our conceptual ideas sometimes, maybe more often.
You never know when you'll all run across some of those--"that's interesting, let's see if we can develop that unusual thought" type ideas that actually do get into the dirt and turn out great.