It’s a great thread and a very good premise.
To start with, yes golf courses are truly artificial, other than areas left native in the design. For most courses, the constructed part is close to 100% of the site, with only patches of undisturbed areas.
Tees must be leveled, and greens and fairways leveled “enough” to fit their function of providing golf surfaces that function under the rules and conventions and maintenance practices of golf. It is a landscape designed for a very particular human use, and changes to the landscape should be expected. Most of the “keep it natural” idea seemingly stems from the old notion of sheep huddling for wind protection and then creating bunkers in Scottish dunes.
So, the land changes, but the question is, how much. Many use the Raynor style as an example. And, its just that – a style of manufacturing critical golf elements, although, in some cases you could argue that he is trying to return the grade back to nature as quickly as possible, and it might be more natural. Other Golf Course Architect’s have espoused the philosophy of never more than doubling the natural grade, using more room to catch back up to grade, but looking plausibly natural, while probably the most common thought is to make disturbed slopes the maximum steepness that can be mowed, sort of half way in between the extremes.
To me, the real question isn’t the Raynor style – it’s the style myself and others used in the 1980-2000’s to various degrees to grade other than non essential golf elements – i.e., mounding all the way down the fairway.
It seems to me that there are/were several basic theories in place:
Don’t grade the fairway with artificial contours, like mounds.
Grade only for support of features – like sand bunkers, raising the back edge of fairway for visibility and ball holding capabilities, and sometimes to support vision through the hole, variance in fairway grades to establish strategies, etc. Included would be backing mounds at the green to provide a visual backstop to the hole.
Grade to place the hole in a visually controlled valley. Even here there are variances – Fazio uses the long slope, no more than double natural slope mentality, whereas Rees, JN, myself and others at different times experimented with the idea or earthwork as artwork, sacrificing naturalness to create visual excitement and also to provide a visual side stop, if you will, where non was present with trees.
There are some valid reasons for style no. 3 – if you want to separate holes, earthmoving is both cheaper and more immediate than planting lots of trees. I have also argued that we are more visually engaged than our forbearers’, mostly because of TV, and “arranging” the landscape into something more visually exciting at the expense of naturalism actually makes some sense for the modern day golfer, even if the tradition from the old days was different. I also believe that “creating spaces” has a lot of appeal to human nature, even more so than just being out in nature. Again, as we move off the farm to big cities, we are more used to existing in man made spaces, and perhaps are more comfortable in them, for reasons we cannot explain.
I believe one of the reasons Fazio is so popular is that he combines the need to “arrange the landscape” and “create spaces” with the natural look, accomplished not only with reasonably natural looking contours, but also massive landscape budgets that give his courses almost instant maturity..