Michael, sorry. I understood the intent of the thread. I just couldn't resist. If you have just finished power washing you unserstand. For twenty hours I have made intimate love to green wood in the mountains of Virginia. I'll see if I can add something.
Plato's ALLEGORY OF THE CAVE has run around in my litle head since I first read it as a freshman in colege in 1964. if dancing shadows on a wall in a cave is your only reality then the bright light of the outside world shatters your world. From CB MacDonald to Pete Dye and Tom Doak architects have studied the storied courses of Great Britain and Ireland. Out of the cave each has uncovered a different idea of the ethereal. The form varies according to these two very different approaches of expressing that reality. CB and Seth Raynor took the idea of the redan but in very Aristotelean ways reproduced it when the terrain called for it. The idea of the redan is timeless the form is not.
Mike Strantz and Pete Dye take the idea and in the interior world or their minds reshape it until it is almost unrecognizable. I have always thought the free form of
expression as superior to the scientific cookie cutter approach of early Nicklaus or RTJ.
If I were to try and put architects into two different philosophical approaches I would do it this way:
Platonic: Pete Dye, Mike Strantz, Coore and Crenshaw, Mike DeVries, Steve Smyers, Alister MacKenzie.
Aristotelean: Donald Ross, Seth Raynor, Jack Nicklaus, Hurdzan and Frye (though they probably would think they are Platonic), Rees Jones, RTJ.
There is my endeavor--too bad it is cow dung.