Peter:
Good post there, and it reminds me just how complex the actual business of golf course architecture is and can be.
Because of that many of us on here who are not in the business are probably just glorified dabblers, although, as you know from speaking with me, I feel there are certain areas where our dabbling (basically the discussion of ideas on here) is a good thing for professional architects maybe even an enhancement for them. At the very least I think it can help them to break away from some of their tendencies toward standardizations.
But then there are all those other more technical areas of golf course architecture---eg construction techniques and methods, agronomics, maintenance and other areas that most all of us who are not in the business have basically zero experience with and therefore very little understanding of.
But what I call the "concept" side is another matter, in my mind. We play golf, we care about architecture, we study what we see and play and we have opinions and ideas and such in that particular area and other than how those ideas and opinions are and can be limited by the realities of construction and drainage and agronomics and maintenance practices and such I see no real reason why some of our ideas and opinions and concepts and such should not be in some cases every bit as good or useful or interesting as those of professional architects.
When it comes to women and architecture I think I was inspired recently by that attractive stewardess I met on a private G5 not long ago. I flew back from the Bahamas with her and the two pilots so I got to talk with her for a couple of hours.
It was a really beautiful sunset and night coming back up the East coast and into Philadelphia and I was trying to take pictures of the sunset and the wing and the sky and such. She watched me for a while and then she just took my camera and did it herself.
She was a real artist, she had a natural eye for it and it turns out she's an interior decorator and designer on the side.
And it just so happens she lives about a mile from that project I'm working on in Maryland with Paul Cowley and the Davis Love Design Co.
So I got her over to the project one time and explained basically what we do and were doing and trying to do.
She picked right up on it and started to offer some ideas and view points which I thought were fresh and interesting and somewhat novel.
She's very pretty and attractive but then she said she had to go down the road to Fair Hill (massive horse training and racing complex where Barbaro was born, lived and trained and died) and defend her hay bail throwing crown. That sort of surprised me for someone who looked like that but she said she was the daughter of a blacksmith, a rider and no shrinking violet. I even told her to not get dressed up when she came over to the site because it can be remarkably dusty and dirty. Later she told me she basically grew up in barns and it was impossible to ever get too dirty.
This is a person who has some of the components to pick up on this business and art like a sponge, in my opinion. She loves nature and the country, she's artistic with a great eye for it even if she doesn't even play golf. I was fascinated by some of the things she noticed and said.