One of the interesting things about this thread, to me, is that most of you only seem able to discuss the difference in conceptual form, instead of using examples in the real world. Can you really not tell the difference between built and found on the courses you all claim to know so well?
When I used to try to figure out whether something was important in golf architecture or not, I would just go back to the rankings, and count up how many of the best courses had that feature, and how many didn't. So: how many of the recent top 100 were built, and how many were found?
Yes, most courses are hybrids . . . some parts found, and others built . . . but I will assign "built" as the category where I believe many of the features you think of when I say the name, were built rather than found.
I will start you off:
Pine Valley is built. Just having to clear all the pine trees destroyed whatever little contours were on the ground so that they had to be rebuilt. Those bunkers along #2 aren't natural. That big old bluff of a green on #1 isn't natural, and neither is the one on #3.
Oakmont is built. Yes, it generally follows natural grade . . . the greens that were built on downslopes mostly still fall away. But all those bunkers and trenches? Built.
Tara Iti is built. Total clearing, so all the contours had to be rebuilt - sound familiar? 25% of the dunes you see are our additions, with tree stumps and debris buried under them. It's more lightly built than Pine Valley, because that's the way everyone who works for me has learned to do it, but it's built.
Bandon Dunes is built, to my eye. Jim Haley, David's lead shaper, had worked for Rees Jones for years, and I don't think he could find a green in the Sand Hills of Nebraska. The site was covered in gorse ten feet tall when they started, and they cleared it with bulldozers, tearing up the ground pretty good as they went.
Sand Hills, obviously, is found. There are only four greens there where they changed existing grade at all; I know because I hit balls around it before they built anything.
Pacific Dunes is found. The fire that happened before construction burned down all the gorse to ankle high, so we could go along with an excavator and a root rake and clear exactly along the lines we wanted, and not disturb the contours underneath too much. Most of the greens are shaped, but the only ones I can think of where we changed the elevation more than a foot are #1 [quite a bit of fill], #4 [dug out from the dune], #11 [dug into the dune], #14 [cut off the top of a dune], and #15 [there was a plateau that same shape and size, but it was quite a bit higher]. Oh, and #18, the right half of it is a bunch of fill placed in a deep hollow. There were a couple of big dunes we took away -- one of them blocked the 18th fairway right at the turn point -- but the big bunker on the left is unchanged except for where the dune was removed. Digging bunkers was generally a matter of flagging the shapes I wanted onto the ground, digging them out a bit and just losing the dirt somewhere back in the fairway . . . nearly all of the top lines of the bunkers are natural grade.
Cypress Point, I would say, is found. MacKenzie was not afraid to plop down a big chunk of fill to give himself a place to build a fairway bunker or green site -- #10 is a great example -- but the famous holes like 8 and 9 and 13 and 15 and 16, and some of the better ones that don't get much credit like #2, are all about natural landforms.
The Old Course at St. Andrews . . . is a tough call. It certainly isn't entirely natural. The first and last holes are built . . . the Swilcan burn was dumping into a wider feature right there 150 years ago. The Road green is built, and so was the Stationmaster's Garden. I'll assume that features like the mounds on #2 and #4 were found, but I can't swear to it. Most of the plateau greens were found, but I am sure that when the course was widened, there was some real shaping done at the edges of greens like 14. Some of the bunkers had natural origins, or just evolved from play over time; others are known to be deliberate additions.
So . . . is Mark correct that Pine Valley, Oakmont, Tara Iti, and Bandon Dunes are the ultimate display of golf architecture?
Or is it Sand Hills, Cypress Point, Pacific Dunes, and The Old Course at St. Andrews?
If it's the former, then how would you explain that some of those examples were "built" by guys who had never designed a course before, while many of the latter were built by the most celebrated designers of their age?
There's something for you all to ponder over Thanksgiving.