The case for Architectural Criticism - A 1925 Manifesto

[TEPaul]

Peter:

That was the article I'd read---that one from Schnectedy.

[Mark Bourgeois]

Okay I need to think on your post but for now:
1. I wonder whether when Macdonald spoke of "natural" he meant it relative to earlier designs or in an absolute sense.  If the latter, that would be really interesting to noodle on further.
2. On finality, MacKenzie's lecture to the North of England Greenkeepers Association in 1913 was titled, "The Importance of Finality," but I don't know if he meant the same thing as Behr.

For Mac it meant: "...nothing pays so well from a financial point of view as making your course as perfect as possible, and so enabling the construction work to be at once practically final."

But Behr meant something else, right?

Mark

[Bradley Anderson]

"This structure has good water absorbing capacity and by capillary action moisture is presumably drawn to some extent from the sub-soil. In the dryest weather comparatively little water is required. "

There were so many different mixes going on back then, with layers of this and that. And this fellow seems to have accidently discovered a perched water table that also acted as an effective deterrent to worms.

In that same article he mentions a chemical for worms. Probably some form of arsenic that turned everything pink for three days, and you could play at night because greens glowed. And you smoked when you applied it.

[TEPaul]

"Okay I need to think on your post but for now:
1. I wonder whether when Macdonald spoke of "natural" he meant it relative to earlier designs or in an absolute sense.  If the latter, that would be really interesting to noodle on further.
2. On finality, MacKenzie's lecture to the North of England Greenkeepers Association in 1913 was titled, "The Importance of Finality," but I don't know if he meant the same thing as Behr.

For Mac it meant: "...nothing pays so well from a financial point of view as making your course as perfect as possible, and so enabling the construction work to be at once practically final."

But Behr meant something else, right?"



MarkB:

In my opinion, your first point is a very important one because it basically puts Macdonald right in the time he first worked on architecture and what that means in the evolution and development of naturalism in golf architecture. Plus I think your point better highlights the realities of the models and perhaps architectural features he was using in the context of naturalism or lack of it.

In my opinion, Macdonald was probably looking at it in relative terms and not in absolute terms.

That's interesting that Mackenzie spoke and wrote about "finality" in 1913. I think that would likely put him before Max Behr on the idea.

Mackenzie's point on "finality" in architecture was pretty basic---ie if a club got a professional to do the work he would do it right the first time and consequently prevent the need to fix things later that generally would happen with people doing the job who didn't have experience. His point was even if it cost more upfront it would be less expensive in the long run.

Max Behr's ideas on "permanent" architecture rested on two ideas:

1. If golfers thought a course and its features were naturally occuring rather than man-made they would be less likely to criticize them and consequently want to alter them.

2. If an architect studied and mimiced the stronger formations of nature in what he made (generally favoring the convex angle over the concave angle) the course would be more likely to withstand the forces of Nature's wind and water.

[Mark Bourgeois]

I am finding it difficult to tear away from Wayne's question, but....

There sure look to be similarities to MacKenzie's thoughts.  When did they meet?

Re #1 MacKenzie does not come out and say that; all I can find is passages where he writes of his being intensely criticized (1915) plus in "Golf Architecture" he writes how his designs fooled greens committee members at Alwoodley and other courses. He slammed committees at least as early as 1914 for never agreeing to anything original while also declaring the importance of making everything artificial look natural.

But that's not the same thing as articulating Behr's argument...

Regarding #2, though, he wrote this of military entrenchments:
"...it is of value to study the kind of slopes which occur in nature and which remain standing for a considerable number of years, for example: if we study closely the slope of a bank of a stream, or a quarry, or the slope of a sand dune, we find that the lower portion slopes considerably whilst the upper portion is vertical, or actually overhangs, as in the diagram; and in constructing the slope of the interior of the trench it is advisable to do it in the same way." [Emphasis original.]

The date on that passage is October 1917, but almost certainly dates back as far as 1915, possibly 1914, for it represents several revisions.

Wayne,

You asked somewhere in this or another thread about MacKenzie's mounds.  Two of the reasons Mackenzie built them:
1. Give interest to flat, uninteresting ground.
2. Economize: carting was the first of seven expense categories he listed in a lecture (and in "Golf Architecture").  By learning how to camouflage piles of unneeded dirt and rubbish, he could "cart in place" without harming his aesthetics:

"Soil taken out of excavations should never be carted away, it can always be used for raising a neighboring green in the form of a plateau or in making hummocks, or large undulations on the spot." (1914)

In his later writings he praises nature's waves and dunes for the variety of lies and stances they create.  Nature -> infinite variety  -> soul of golf -> must manufacture folds, hollows, hummocks, waves, etc. -> cart in place -> save money as a bonus.  Time and again MacKenzie in his writings speaks of the economy of imitating nature.

I can't say he was constrained for cost at CPC, but MacKenzie found economy hugely important.  I think he wanted to come in under budget on every single job -- he seemed to fight a lifelong struggle against greens committees who refused to hire professional designers on the grounds of expense.

He wrote in 1927 of budgeting $80,000 for constructing Meadows Golf Course but spending only $20,000 through construction of all but two greens - the man was a Scot!

Mark

[Sean_A]

Mark

If you had a contractor who always came in under budget wouldn't you begin to suspect his budgets may be inflated?  Though I realize that back in the day the archie could encounter unforseeable situations.  Perhaps Dr Mac learned to pad out his budgets after a few surly encounters with the unknown.

Ciao
   

[TEPaul]

"But that's not the same thing as articulating Behr's argument..."

Mark:

It doesn't have to be exactly the same thing to conclude those two guys were coming from the same basic point and also going in basically the same direction on naturalism, the look of it in golf architecture and the endurance of it in golf architecture.

I don't know where Behr and Mackenzie first met but apparently they spent a couple of weeks together at St Andrews in the 1920s basically ganging up on Joshua Crane for his ideas on rating and ranking golf architecture via a scientific or mathematical method. And it would be really unlikely that they did not hang around one another when they were both in California.

Bob Crosby and I believe this really brought the two of them (and others together) to better define and promote what they called "strategic" architecture over the influence of what they referred to as "penal" architecture.

[Mark Bourgeois]

Surely Behr would have been made aware of MacKenzie's views much earlier.  In 1915 Behr's Golf Illustrated published a transcript of MacKenzie's lecture on military entrenchments, in which MacKenzie said / wrote:

"My ideas on golf course construction, for example, have been mercilessly criticized and condemned, and it has taken me nearly ten years to persuade the public that there is anything in my views on course construction.  It may be asked what earthly connection is there between golf course construction and trench making?  The connection consists in the imitation of nature.  The whole secret of successful course construction and concealment in trench making consists in making artificial features indistinguishable from natural ones, and for the last ten years I have been daily attempting to imitate nature."

Later, he says / writes of proper trench structure:
"Not that at point d [note: this is the apex of the parador or rear of the trench] the raised portion curves slightly downwards, forming an overhanging lip."

It would be interesting to know how this article came to Golf Illustrated.  It was published in the April 1915 edition and is likely a reprint of a 6 March 1915 Country Life article.

One possibility is Bernard Darwin, though.  In his February 1915 Golf Illustrated column, he references the lecture and it appears by the text he attended in person, although he does not actually write that.  Interesting perhaps only to me, given Darwin's writing of the lecture in Feb 1915, it seems likely MacKenzie would have given this lecture in 1914.

This transcript, then, would be the "index" lecture, which MacKenzie later wrote of as a 1914 lecture, subsequently revised in 1915 and 1916. (And published in October 1917.)

I don't think any of this has anything to do with Wayne's question, though.  These ideas are more like an echo of ideas first voiced perhaps as early as 1901, when MacKenzie wrote 2-3 pages in the Leeds Golf Club suggestion book explaining how the course could be improved.

These ideas were so well received they killed his chance at captain of that club! (Reference "15 year" comment in first MacKenzie quote above.)

On the other hand, perhaps the connection is we are explaining the diffusion of his ideas, how, how fast, and when this process occurred / began.

I say "his": it's not clear which ideas falling under the category of naturalism belonged to Mac, which belonged to Colt, and which sort of sprung forth in a dialectical, kaffee-klatsch kind of way.

I continue to like Wayne's "nature faker" term (which I know he ascribes to Flynn) as I believe MacKenzie appreciated the subjective experience of playing the course, the mental, psychological response to the "optical inputs" far more than any other designer, and I think he did it first.  I'm not sure Colt got past the idea that he truly was honoring nature and taking what she gave, even as at places like St. George's Hill he totally obliterated nature.

It's a subtle difference between the two designers, one more of conception and explanation or rationalization rather than perception (although here again I think MacKenzie drew on techniques for deliberate visual deception, not simply the imitation of nature), but in my opinion it does help explain the rise of obscurantism.

I also think maybe MacKenzie's core ideas were misunderstood or distorted in some way, and these misunderstandings provided the intellectual rationale for excessive bunkering, overshaping, and ironically the clearly unnatural work of many efforts post-Second World War.

Mark

[TEPaul]

"It would be interesting to know how this article came to Golf Illustrated.  It was published in the April 1915 edition and is likely a reprint of a 6 March 1915 Country Life article."

Very likely in the most obvious way of all---eg they subscribed to Country Life. A ton of Americans did. My own family subscribed to that magazine for probably a hundred years.

I'm a little perplexed by your ongoing fixation on deception or obscurantism. I think these guys were simply trying to imitate the formations of nature as well as they could. All they were really trying to obscure is what they sometimes referred to as "the hand of man."

[Mark Bourgeois]

Well, you're right to call it a fixation.  What's the big deal about hiding the hand of man?

I don't know how much MacKenzie or anyone else really tried to manipulate golfers' perceptions and psychological / mental reactions or processing of what golfers saw, but I find the notion just fascinating.  Just reading through MacKenzie's writings on military and golf design matters I am struck by how regularly he seems to design in terms of what human eye expects to see -- or I should say how the human mind most likely will process the input.

It's one thing to design something to imitate nature to give people something pretty to look at -- and I accept that may be all some or all of them were trying to do, without sacrificing "shot values" or functionality -- but I am making a distinction between "real" nature and how golfers process / interpret nature: not "real" nature but their expectation of nature.  What they expect to see, what they want to see.

The mind is fantastically advanced at processing data that aren't there -- "filling in" the blank spots.

And then on top of that deception which plays very explicitly not to some objective reality but to a reality based on how the human mind expects it to be -- on top of that to further consider how a human being likely will respond to this artificial stimulus, in terms of "thrills," "fear," surprise, whatever.  That is amazing to me.

Looking backwards with our modern perspective, it's easy to miss how different this thinking probably was from 30-50 years earlier. Pretty much every novel (no, not every novel) used to tell its story in linear, chronological time, often from omniscient, third-person POV.

That's one way we tell stories today, but other approaches, so radical in the early 20th Century, we process and accept today without a moment's thought.  Take the movie "Michael Clayton" just to name a recent example...

It gets to that first point you make about Behr.  You have got to fool people...not by leaving "nature" alone, but by manipulating and recreating what the human mind interprets in its field of vision as "natural."  Then you create a selective sort of "nature" designed to trigger specific psychological responses.

The bottom line of all this is they manipulated our "mind's eyes" or the expectations we form unconsciously to produce really good-quality "tie ins."  That's not really what I am enjoying thinking about, though.  It's the idea of designing for emotional, mental, psychological response. How do you accomplish something like that?  What are the design elements? When and where do you use them?

If you start thinking about this, you will see threads that pop up from time to time that fit into this framework, like thinking of a round of golf like a narrative, for example a narrative holding to the myth of the "odyssey," threads like:
*Should the first few holes be tough?
*"Anticipation of confrontation"

Golf courses of the mind...

To repeat: I am not saying they set out to do this 100 percent of the time or even most of the time or even that they really even were aware they were doing this.

It is just how I have been processing MacKenzie's writing: ALL IMHO!!!!!

[TEPaul]

“What's the big deal about hiding the hand of man?”

Mark:

The only one I’m aware of who wrote in depth about the REASONS to do that vis-à-vis  golfers’ impressions was Max Behr. I already told you what his reasons were---eg that the golfer would be less likely to criticize obstacles that tripped him up that he perceived as natural while he would be more likely to criticize obstacles that tripped him up that were clearly man-made. Behr believed if golfers thought something was natural they would be less likely to criticize it and want to change it. He called that as well as the imitating of the strongest natural formations so Nature would not be so likely to tear it up “Permanent Architecture”.

As to precisely why Behr felt the golfer would be less likely to criticize something he thought was natural and more likely to criticize something he thought was man-made he didn’t exactly say but I think his strong implication was a comparison of Man’s inherent relationship with Nature VS Man’s inherent relationship with Man. His assumption was apparently that Man inherently viewed Nature as far more indomitable than Man.

As far as your ideas about architects such as Mackenzie simply designing to create some maximum emotional response from the golfer, I’m not sure about that.

Mackenzie, like Macdonald, actually wrote he wanted to design things that created a certain amount of controversy. He obviously viewed a certain amount of controversy in architecture as a good thing and that’s why he was disappointed when Hunter reported to him that everyone just loved Cypress Point on opening because they all thought it was so beautiful. He apparently felt the beauty of the place had completely overwhelmed their ability to see the controversy in the course which he was hoping they’d notice and respond to.

[TEPaul]

"-- but I am making a distinction between "real" nature and how golfers process / interpret nature: not "real" nature but their expectation of nature.  What they expect to see, what they want to see."

Mark:

That's a pretty novel thought, I guess.

I'm not sure how any architect could do something like that simply because I wonder how he even thinks he knows how all golfers process/interpret nature, what their collective expectation of nature is, and what they expect to see and want to see.

In my opinion, perhaps the golf architect should simply do all that and just interpret that with and for his own mind and sensibilities and just leave it at that. I guess that's what good artists do and what good artists are good at.  

Essentially that's exactly what Kelly Blake Moran said recently on another thread---ie that the things he creates are essentially for himself and his own sensibilities and interpretations.

On the other hand, Tom Fazio in his own book, essentially said he knows what golfers will accept and what they won't accept.

Well, good for Tom Fazio, although I have no idea how or why he thinks he is so informed about what all golfers will accept and will not accept!  

In my opinion, the inclination of Mackenzie and Macdonald to just try to create some exciting and perhaps beneficial controversy is probably a better idea and likely a much more realistic one!

[Mac Plumart]

The Progress of Golf Architecture – June 16th, 1925

Golf architecture involves far more than the laying out of a definite number of holes each of a virtually standardized length.   That these lengths are standardized can hardly be questioned, even if the distances are only approximately equal and those decreed by what golfers think best.   There is general agreement that the desirable total length of 18 holes should be between 6,000 and 6,500 yards.   If one should judge from a large proportion of golf courses, the designer had no other end in view than that stated above, namely a course whose measurements approximate a standard.   There is seldom any indication of originality, except of the freaky kind, and rarely any conception of landscape beauty.  Apart from the relatively mathematical or mechanical features of golf course building, which any one can learn quickly, there lies the whole art, which will make or break the reputation of every golf architect.   Only the sluggish mind of an easily satisfied public has blinded it to the hideousness of most of our golf courses.   Sometimes the beauty of the surroundings helps to conceal the ugliness of the artificial work, though the lack of any harmony be only too obvious.   Fortunately, perhaps, many architects make their artificial work concealed or half-concealed, such as blind bunkers.   Otherwise its unloveliness would be too patent.

This may sound like the writing of one suffering a severe attack of indigestion.   It is meant to be the expression of feeling of one who is saddened by the absence of landscape beauty in too much of the artificial constructions on golf courses.   A sand bunker can be made a thing of beauty or a hideous gash.   Fortunately, many of the latter are build “blind”.   The artificial lines can be curves that fit in with those of the terrain, or they can be angular and jar every sense of harmony.   After all, a golf architect worthy of the name must be an artist, painting his ideas on the face of Nature as his canvas.  The painter retouches his work again and again.  Too many architects make the mechanical plans and leave practically all else to the construction gang.  Some indeed work on a cut-and-dried series of models, which are reproduced here, there, and yonder regardless of the terrain.   When you see one course built by such an architect, you can recognize at once every other course he has built.   This is true not in the sense that one can learn to recognize a Corot, or a Lansdowne, but true to actual mechanical details.   There is merit in the idea that holes of proven reputation ought to be copied – especially if these replicas apply as to principles but not as to details.   If however this idea is embalmed in a set of mechanical models, then there can obviously be no progress as long as these are followed, neither for the architect himself nor for his art.   To be blunt, such an architect is sacrificing his art to present commercial gain.

Perhaps the architect is not so much to blame as is the golfing public.   As long as there is no criticism, he may well believe that he is producing meritorious results.   A few courses built in recent years are examples of splendid landscape architecture.   The influence of these will doubtless stimulate golfers to demand better work from the architects.   To build artistic curves will require more of an architect’s time than he takes at present.  It can not be done, especially in its finishing stages, by a brief visit once a month or so.   That is too much like a landscape artist hiring a journeyman painter to paint pictures for him.   It can be done, of course, but the results are not inspiring.

Golf architects ought to be the leaders in promoting the progress of golf.   They are not.  Today many courses are being built by professional golf players that are as good as or better than those made by professional architects.   Except for a few notable exceptions in the profession, the term architect can hardly be used at present as relating to golf architects.   There are also a goodly number of amateurs who have done very beautiful work which can truly be called artistic.  Every architect owes it both to himself and to the golfing world to strive toward perfection.   We believe it will be more profitable to him to build fewer and better courses.  

There is progress for the betterment of golf architecture, but it is very slow.   It will continue to be slow as long as the artistic sense is sacrificed to immediate commercial gains.

Bump...

Awesome stuff!!