David,
You're a cynic.....but I actually agree with you, as I said a few posts after my initial one. No doubt the gca who told me he was a minimalist by choice was "glomming on" or simply lamenting that he was not part of a popular movement in his profession. The news is that minimalism could be used at high end projects in place of what was taking place prior. And, just as most of us went for "the look" of the 90's, many are now going for the minimalist look.
To all,
I am actually kinda dissapointed. Really, if there was one entity the world would look to to be able to define minimalism, I suspect this place is it, but we are still kind of vague!
TD and Mike,
I don't disagree on the routing aspect. That said, I would put my routing ability against anyone's. I think most of the archies who participate here would do it, too, no? I just wonder if statistically, we could figure out whose routings minimize earth moving, areas where fw needed to be graded, reduce walks, allow for drainage, etc, as per Mike's list.
It would even be fascinating to look at say, Faz, and try to determine which courses he followed the land and which ones he ignored it to fix later with earthmoving. My gut would be that there were more follow the land routings than not, but that Faz still chose to improve nature a little bit with his feature shaping. At one point, given Faz does pretty naturalistic greens (IMHO) I was always amazed at how much earthmoving he did in fw, and how little he did around most greens! His greens were very traditionalist at his peak.
Net, net, its pretty hard to judge whose routing work is best, because we will never know the other options (except maybe in open competitions), and each architect might follow the land, and then build non minimalistic features. Or make different value judgements as to what the minimum amound of work is.