Allow me to nominate Grand Beach, a 9-hole Tom Bendelow loop in far SW Mich. that opened in 1912 and felt as though almost nothing in the way of design change had been done to it since.
I would be curious whether contemporary golf course architects who do end up redesigning/renovating the work of an established architect from a bygone era ever feel a tinge of ambivalence/melancholy about it. I grew up playing several Geoffrey Cornish courses and wonder whether on a long enough timeline, everything he ever did will be erased, and how the people who end up erasing his work will feel about it.
We may already know Jeff Brauer's thoughts on this, at least with regard to Floyd "Oklahoma Golf Hall-of-Famer" Farley.
Tim,
No one reveres the architects who followed Bendelow in being the Johnny Appleseeds of golf in various regions more than I do. I am really only one step above that in my work. I have also written here that I wouldn't be in a big rush to restore any but the top 25% or so of Ross courses, especially those that he didn't even visit.
That said, Kickingbird Golf Course was well routed and not in need of a lot of earthworks, so we know he was talented and also talented in getting low cost courses built across the Midwest. But does a course that was built as the cheapest possible course when Edmond was a small town, which was needed then, need to be restored now that it is in a big city urban area, competing with a lot of new courses that are better designed? I recommended that they plan for the future myself.....big mistake! I mean, if we are accurate in building to the FF philosophy, wouldn't we be building something for the inflation equivalent to the $300,000 he typically spent just to get a course on the ground in a small city? BTW, that is about $2.3Mil, which would just give you a functional golf course at best. Or, in 2024, an irrigation system if you ever got the funds to build the rest of the course.
More specifically, there were no paths originally, and maybe no sand bunkers. Either way, the course tended to have bunkers right in the major walkways from cart path to green, which causes wear when playing 40K rounds. I personally would never redesign something and build in the same operational problems, but maybe that is just me.
All of that said, if in design, form follows function, I have always thought that any design ought to look at its functionality and solve function issues with forms specifically designed to do so, even if not historically accurate. Times have changed and look to be changing even more in the future, with sustainability issues, etc.
To answer your broader question, I doubt too many architects would shed a tear or be ambivalent about changing most of the work out there. For that matter, I am starting to go crazy when talented architects admit before a project that they couldn't possibly do better than a Floyd Farley, or even a Ross. To stay in this biz, you need a bit of an ego and some talent. Today's architects, IMHO, should be
building on our predecessors' accomplishments (and fixing errors or things that didn't age well) rather than just copy what they did.
Maybe that is just me.