"To me, this (why can one architect see nothing on a piece of land, and another build a great course there?) is far more interesting than trying to pick nits about who was awarded which commission and why."
Rich:
This is far more interesting to me too, both in the earlier Golden Age and also today.
I'm beginning to believe that some architects simply have far greater imagination to see the less than obvious than others do---and most ironically, I'm not sure it even has that much to do with how good any architects are ultimately---it's all just a different approach or perhaps simply very different talents! The ones who don't have raw talent and vision to make something out of nothing though probably are the ones who sometimes create courses that aren't that interesting. To me, Ross maybe the most obvious example of that.
Broadly speaking (and all this is only my personal opinion) I think some architects are very good at imagining how to absolutely maximize almost everything a site and potential hole landforms may usefully give them NATURALLY while other architects may either miss some or most of this and simply see the image or vision of what they can manufacture out of various landforms---even those landforms others may see as naturally useful!
I have a sense Ross may have very much been the former and it might explain a sort of standardized routing and hole modus that's fairly obvious on most his courses---certainly the more topographical ones (high tee and green sites with intervening valleys) while an early architect like Flynn saw the possiblities in most any landform, no matter how different it may have been naturally!
In a certain sense a mind like Flynn's in both total routing and also various landform uses may have been something like that scene in "Rain Man" where Hoffman looked at the spilled matches from the match box on the floor and went----ZIP---"Uh-oh, there're three matches missing from a full box!" He just looked a a hundred or so matches lying in a jumble and had the ability to instantly mentally count them, where someone like me would have to spent five minutes counting them all by twos to figure out even remotely how many were in the jumble much less if any were missing from a full box.
Flynn was simply the latter type to me, something like an architectural "Rain Man". I think he just had an ability or talent to look at a general atmosphere or unarranged and unobvious group of pieces (potential hole landforms) and make instant sense out of it all where others would have to spend far more time putting the pieces together slowly and in various ways.
That could explain why a Flynn might say a site like Cascades had potential while others might only see the severe topographical obstacles in that raw site. What actually happened with Cascades, I think, is he told the client it had potential to be terrific but that the client didn't have the money to make it so. The client fixed that by bascically saying "I don't care about that ---just do it." And of course it certainly helped that Flynn had an engineer for a partner to put his visions easily into reality. Indian Creek is very much this way too but from the opposite extreme of Cascades (at first appearing to have too many natural obstacles for a golf course) to something of such blank canvas as to hardly know where to begin like Indian Creek.
Obviously Macdonald had some real talent to visualize or imagine something out of nothing (Lido) or even something out of something that might appear too much (Yale) and then the visual ability to go to real extremes to create it. Of course he too had his partner engineer to put the detail of it to the reality.
I think Tillinghast probably had that ability to do it both ways too. Mackenzie, on the other hand, may have been a super quick study in how to use natural landforms as they were without that much sense of how to massively change them---or maybe that style (MacD/Raynor just never sat well with him being the ultra natural appearing architect he apparently was.
I think Crump probably had a hard time visualizing natural landforms but spent so much time at PVGC that he got better at it---plus he did have Colt to almost instantly correct some of his initial confusion or lack of initial vision.
But Ross seems to me to be the other way---and that might explain why his more obvious topographical sites for golf are so much better than his flatter ones----unless given years to work on it such as Pinehurst #2.
Today, an architect who has almost unlimited ability to visualize something out of nothing or something out of mindbending complexity is probably Tom Fazio. I'm not sure he has the time or inclination though to use something wholly as it is!
An architect like Coore I think has a real talent to visualize how to use the unobvious and to also use very small natural things and built hole concepts around them. I think Doak probably does too but understands how to fix anything that seems problematic. I think Gil Hanse has a very fertile imagination to use something apparently radical as well as make something from pratically nothing.
I think this is an interesting subject and although some architects may bring very different raw talents to the table, in the end either one may work out interesting and may work out well.
Desmond Muirhead in his later architectural years and what he saw or didn't see? That's probably too complex to even get into!
