Part of this thread was to see how defensive some posts might get about the idea of “copying or repeating” design concepts. No artist wants to hear that they are just duplicating past work so I understand the sensitivity. In that regard, I wonder what Pete Dye would have said about the PGA West/TPC at Sawgrass thread? Knowing him he wouldn’t care as he knows what he built and what both courses were designed to accomplish. I tried to defend him, not that he needed it, in that thread in that I really don’t think he sold out at all and that the two courses while having some very similar “template” type holes are still very different in my eyes. I am not sure if Tom Doak liked or didn't like my analogy but you could call those two courses the same beautiful woman dressed up a little differently. The two courses are set on very different sites with very different surrounds very far away from one another. I am very much ok with that. As I also said very few golfers would ever figure the similarities because only a handful will ever play both courses and even then few will recognize the similar holes. I pointed out the example at Cherry Hills where Flynn used three template holes from Pine Valley and it was not even known at the club even by Pine Valley members that he did this. Why not let more golfers get to experience that same beautiful woman (Tom Doak called that a lame idea). If I started a thread that Raynor was not one of the greatest architects because he had no artistic talent and just replicated/forced golf holes on the land, this site would have blown up in outrage. Many would have vigorously defended his use of “the same” golf holes over and over. But when the concept of replicating golf holes in general comes up suggesting many others also do it in some fashion, some freak out that this is not true and not happening and would show no creativity if it were true. Clearly the details of how two similar holes are finished off are what separates the good from the great. I have said that many times here and that it often takes more than one quick look around a golf course to determine just how good some of the greatest golf courses really are. The best designs need to be studied to be learned. That is in part why sometimes new courses in the Top 100 rankings spike high and then sputter out after people study them a little more and realize there was maybe more sizzle than substance. It can be the other way around as well. So the takeaway from this thread if anyone wants one is that it helps to look closer at individual golf holes and try to identify what are sometimes subtle details that separate one from the other even though they might essentially be built on the same template. You might be surprised what you see. By the way, I wonder if Raynor would say he never built the same hole twice Technically speaking, he never did but he was damn good at the details.
Mark:
It is much easier to not be defensive about someone twisting your words and work out of context, when you have no work to defend.
I refused to answer your OP question because you almost immediately redefined "using templates" as building any hole that resembled anything built before. Everyone recognizes that it is very rare to come across a hole truly unlike the other 500,000 golf holes currently on planet Earth, but there is a huge difference between trying to be creative and repeating the same themes on every course, or even on almost every course.
After that, I would sort the idea of using templates today into three categories:
1. There are many young architects who introduce templates like the Redan and Biarritz in their work. Some seem to be trying to find new ways to riff on them, while others seem to include them as talking points to establish their credibility as someone who knows about the history of design. Many great designers have done just this at some early stage of their careers -- I mentioned Pete Dye at Crooked Stick earlier.
2. There are many well established architects whose work repeats itself, not on every project like Raynor, but often enough. There are obvious commercial reasons for this -- the client has declared he liked those ideas on a previous course, and of course it's way less time consuming to "plug and play" when you are building a bunch of courses in a year and don't have much time to be on site. I'm not sure whether it was Pete Dye or Jack Nicklaus who first introduced the idea of having long 9th & 18th holes play up either side of a large pond, but I must have seen that twenty times in the 1980's and 90's.
3. There are a few architects who are more stubborn, and won't use the same idea too many times, even if it was theirs to begin with. In this regard, it's very hard to compare a guy who's built five courses with guys who have built 50 or 150, but at the end of the day it's about attitude, which is why I mentioned the phrase artistic temperament. Some guys are happy to wonder aloud why we don't use some oft-repeated idea even more often, and some guys want to shoot those guys in a duel.
But there is hardly anyone who never borrows an idea from somewhere else and adapts it to their own project. There were a few of them back in the early days -- guys like Fownes and Crump -- but there were a lot fewer good courses to copy back then. And they had to quit at one course to be sure not to repeat themselves.