Mike and Joe,
Thanks for posting. I had that article in the files years ago, lost it, and its nice to have it back as a record.
Adam,
In saying "still embedded in the modern PLAYER's pathos" are you discussing the "fairness" aspect for top players, or the general idea of what an American golf course ought to look like by the average Joe Six pack? Obviously, designing for fairness, play value, etc. is a completely different issue than designing for ease of maintenance.
When I started at KN in 1977, they often referred to Cornish and Graves writings, including something called the design triangle. It was a graphic attempt at showing the balance of design needs between playability, aesthetics and maintenance. They would present it to each client, and let the client tell them if it was to be an equilateral triangle, or lean on side or the other. Their inclination, the times, the client types, whatever, had more of their triangles lean towards maintenance.
The kinds of things they (and anyone really) had to consider to make a course maintainable included:
All machine mowing:
Max 3 to 1 slopes, 4-6 to 1 preferred.
Sand bunkers at least 8 feet from green to allow triplex green mower to turn on collar
Sand bunkers - tune shapes to turning radius of both mechanical bunker rakes (about 9 feet) and outside bank mowers (similar, with a few twists once they came out with mowers that could back up, etc.)
Well, there are more, of course but I won't bore you. Suffice to say, tuning the design to then maintenance equipment available certainly did lead to a formula for design followed by most of the era. We were lucky to have Pete Dye come along and say "come up with new maintenance equipment to maintain my designs, rather than me design to suit your maintenance equipment." And, design was better for it.
I understand that this site is mostly dedicated to discussing the top 1% of courses (arguing whether some course should be 85 or 43, for instance) but in the real world of America's 16,000 golf courses, which have always struggled to make a go of it, designing for maintenance was, is and will be a big issue. I believe the next generation of designs below the top will return to this type of thinking, and perhaps the 1985-2005 period of the "upscale public" and "remote destination resorts" will be an anomaly. Sort of golf's version of everyone being a genius in a bull market.
Obviously, we won't go exactly back to that 1950's landscape architecture version of golf design, but form still needs to follow function, and truthfully, these guys designed for the conditions they had in front of them, not to emulate Scottish links, etc., in the new world. I don't think their design responses were out of line at all, even as easy as it is to sit here 40 years later and critique on the internet. The times simply wouldn't have supported the upscale course in those days (and the market isn't black and white, but it wouldn't support more than a few of them in select markets)
Or put another way, we will stop striving to make every course a new top 100 candidate, which was probably more folly than trying to design affordable, maintainable courses prior to 1985 or so.
Or put yet another way, too many designs (again, for those upscale publics) probably let the triangle tip too far towards aesthetics and the photo wow factor than was or is currently justified economically for most courses.