Anthony,
Perhaps a refresher is in order.
From the Renaissance website....
"For the most part, minimalism is just good common sense, a refusal to let design ideas out of thin air outweigh the realities of the site. Instead of reshaping a severe slope, we try to figure out how to use it to make a golf hole interesting. If it’s just too severe, we’ll try a sequence of holes which avoids it entirely. The bulldozer is our third and last option.
This philosophy of design doesn’t mean we can’t work with less-than-perfect properties. On the contrary, when you are dealing with a severely hilly and rocky site like Stone Eagle, or a dead flat site like Texas Tech, the ability to figure out how to make good golf holes while moving less earth is more important than ever.
We have been blessed to work on some extraordinary sites, and we‘ve established what results we can achieve with them. By the same token, sites like Beechtree and Riverfront might have been dismissed by other designers as dull properties, and we managed to find interest in them without moving any more earth on the fairways than we did at Pacific Dunes. Good detail work goes a long way.
We do understand how to move earth when the need arises, whether it’s to add interest to a flat site or to soften a steep one. In fact, you have to be really good at moving earth to conceal what you’ve done, when the surrounding landscape is untouched. Any edge of disturbance, be it a clearing line or a major earthwork, is strenuously examined and finessed until it is blurred beyond recognition. This is the key to producing a new course that looks like it’s been there for 75 years."