Macdonald’s contributions:
1. The notion of “schools”
2. The notion of golf course design as architecture
3. The Classical School of golf
architecture – here “schools” in the larger architectural tradition; i.e., Classical architecture (not simply classical
golf architecture)
What is Classical? I don’t think Macdonald provides a formal definition but probably the closest he comes is to call it the opposite of “novelty and innovation.” He quotes a Humphrey Repton passage that mentions “old established principles.”
Classical does not mean unnatural. “Unnatural” doesn’t really fit into the concept of architecture. “Inharmonious,” “poorly sited,” and “incongruent” are the architectural analogies. A golf hole should fit its surrounds, it should sit harmoniously in those surrounds.
Macdonald certainly abhorred those geometric patterns of early
architecture – note here the intent of “architecture” as in Wayne’s pictures of early
architecture: those squared-off greens are manmade formalism. As a proponent (founder?) of golf course design as
architecture (as opposed to "scupture" or analogous) he was more concerned with the conceptual as opposed to the perceptual. I would argue the big difference between Macdonald’s angular forms and those seen in many of Wayne’s pictures is that Macdonald’s are harmonious, or at least reasonably harmonious, with the environment.
Let’s take the infamous description of Sleepy Hollow’s 16th as a
plate of green Flan. Many decry this as “unnatural.” Well of course: it’s manmade. Macdonald, in studying the site, reached into his memory for a hole, manmade, whose architecture would be “in harmony” with, would fit into, the surrounding environment, even as it was a manmade thing.
And so: the sand is to the Hudson River as the green is to the Palisades on the opposite bank. The Palisades run along the West Bank of the Lower Hudson, an imposing angular ridge whose sandstone furnished the materials of brownstone townhouses so distinctive to Murray Hill, the Upper West Side, Prospect Park, Brooklyn Heights and other neighborhoods of New York City.
It’s not natural, but Macdonald would have seen it as congruent, as harmonious, with its surrounds.
Or, as Ran writes in the caption to the above picture: “Good architecture adds to, not subtracts from, its environment.” I like Ran's choice of “adds to:” that phrase rather than “lies hidden in,” “is indistinguishable from,” or “is one and the same with.”
Macdonald’s conception of “golf architecture,” founded on the closest thing to universal principles of architecture he could find – the “tried and true” – yet bounded by nature, in harmony with nature, provided what may be the most aspirational view in the recorded history of golf course design: to elevate its practice from the local and specific of the game of golf to the universal of true, legitimate “architecture.”
This helped, and helps, legitimize the profession. It's also a call for golf course "architects" to do a better job conceptualizing, framing, and positioning their craft: to aim higher, and locate their profession away from the specific and towards the universal.
Personally, I have issues calling golf course design “architecture.” Architecture to me is about not only the manmade and the structured but the materials involved, too. But thinking out loud maybe my issue stems from the triumph of the Obscurantists. I am looking back at Macdonald, as well as the concept of "architecture," through that frame, rather than through the one provided by The Neanderthal of Golf.
I read a golf article not long since in which the writer called a “fetish” the copying of holes from the classical courses of Great Britain, holes which have the testimony of all the great golfers for more than a century or two past as being expressive of the best and noblest phases of the game.
Architecture is one of the five fine arts. If the critic’s contention is true, then architecture must be a “fetish,” as the basis of it is the copying of Greek and Roman architecture, Romanesque and Gothic, and in our own times among other forms, Georgian and Colonial architecture. One must have the gift of imagination to successfully apply the original to new situations. Surely there is nothing “fetish” about this.
-- Charles Blair Macdonald, “Scotland’s Gift: Golf,” p. 250.
Mark