Mike
If I recall the previous discussions regarding construction versus design it had to do with the meaning of the phrase "laying out". Did that mean designing the course ie. position of tees, greens, hazards etc, or did it mean building the greens, tees, hazards etc to someone else's design ?
That discussion referred to a different age to the one that Thomas was writing about ie. late 19th century up to pre WW1 as opposed to the golden age of the 1920's. That said, Thomas's book is a great read.
Niall
Hi Niall,
For our purposes here, particularly in America, I'm counting the "Golden Age" as the time period beginning with the early attempts to implement "Scientific Architecture", such as the Travis redesign of Garden City, then NGLA, followed in short order with Pine Valley, Merion, Lido, Shawnee, Pinehurst #2, etc., all pre-WWI efforts. I think these guys who were studying things were all using shared lexicon and ideas. Yes, after WWI during the "Roaring 20s" GCA boomed only to later run into the Depression & WWII.
During those discussions much was made of the term "Construction Committee", with the implication that the job of those committees was simply to execute someone else's design plans on the ground, to simply build as opposed to design. It sounded good and plausible to our modern understanding of the terms. However, this was not the case at all and even George Crump's design and build team was called the "Construction Committee", as Joe Bausch discovered in early articles from Tillinghast. Thomas's book and usage of the terms interchangeably puts an exclamation point on that fact.
And you're correct, the term "laid out" was debated strenuously for a long time, but over that period countless examples were found where it meant strictly design, others where it meant only construction to another's plans, and many more where it met some degree of both, particularly within clubs who were doing what were called at the time "inhouse jobs", often over a period of years with various club amateurs collaborating, sometimes seeking external professional and amateur counsel.