This is one of the most fascinating threads I've seen in my short time as a participant here. And what a privilege to have many of our top architects and designers weigh in and share their philosophies and their common sense approaches to the real people and the real games they design for.
If Variety is at the heart of great golf courses and architecture (and all the visual arts), we're learning here, from our best designers, that the variety of achievements by a wide variety of architects, should be celebrated. Emotions like "hate" are simply way out of bounds in discussing architects and courses we don't like. Golf course architecture is, for those of us who play the courses, a matter of entertainment, a source, hopefully of fun and beauty. It is not a matter calling for moral judgments, personal vilification, and hatred. Golf courses, and their creators, call for aesthetic consideration, and, in matters of taste, de gustibus non est disputandum. No one is obliged to like all courses or to play all courses. We golfers are free to choose the courses and designers we like, presumably those that, for us, are fun to play and in attractive environments.
That being said, many of us fall prey to the contemporary ratings mania, where golf courses and architects are treated like racehorses and we feel the need to make the most of our $2 bet or two cents worth opinions about our favorite choices. Going to war over whether natural or artificial courses are to be preferred is folly, as both are desirable and, as has been pointed out often here, there is no such thing as a golf course in Nature. From the first philosophical discussions in our Western culture, art has been seen as an imitation of nature. And art, from the earliest days, has functioned to produce beauty and instruction: it was dulce et utile. Classical artists have always stuck pretty close to this imitative approach to art. Surely, we are right in speaking of Donald Ross, for example, as a Classical designer. With reverence for Nature, he designed to find his holes and courses there.
But when Nature does not supply the real thing Man desires, such as a playing ground for a new game, Man has always needed to help Her. That kind of refinement is what we call art, the artificial imposition upon Nature of some desirable qualities not already created by Her. Later theorists, who understood that Nature is sometimes "red in tooth and claw," and that she needs to be tamed or improved by man, are known as Romantic artists and architects. Such artists considered that Man's creative capacity was nearly Divine, as were his imagination and inventiveness. Such attitudes led to much more aggressive impositions upon Nature, where the applications of artifice functioned sometimes to tame the wildness of Nature, sometimes to enhance and beautify what God presumably didn't do well enough.
The tension, in both the arts and in criticism, between Classicism and Romanticism is both universal and highly progressive and productive. This tension, though, is essentially a competition between different tastes. And in the course of our Western history, one approach tends to dominate our consciousness for a period of time; then, excesses in the practice of that style bring about some artistic revolt and the other approach tends to dominate for the next phase of an art's development. The revolution typically comes when the rules of art become so narrowly defined and restrictive of creativity that a kind of staleness and repetitiveness infect the works produced and inhibit the artist's natural impulses to create something novel, extraordinary, outside the box, if you will.
Originally, for example, the application of the principles of Classicism led to the creation of many of our culture's masterpieces in the arts. Eventually, though, artists begin to classify rules for production, categorize types of art, delimit the perimeters of art, and insist, in a kind of fundamentalist fashion, that great art had to be ... according to the classical traditions as encoded in some academic rules. (Does this sound familiar as we discuss golf course architecture?) Great imaginative artists then chafed under the rules and traditions, said "No, in Thunder," and set off to do their creative work in revolutionary ways. At first, such Romantic art works confused, then infuriated older artists and critics and patrons of the arts, those in fact who paid for the production. Inevitably, some of the most open-minded in a culture began to appreciate the products of the artistic imagination freed from the constraints of traditional, codified rules of practice. Soon after, a massive change in the culture's taste led to a triumph of the new, liberated, unconventional, highly artificial Romantic art.
And that phase of critical approval too passed, where the excesses of unconventional, not to say revolutionary practices, led to many outrageous and incomprehensible art works and evoked in the culture a sense that things have gotten so out of control, art had gotten so far from Nature and from its obligation to give pleasure, that the next Classical era needed to emerge.
Our artificial designers and our minimalist designers reflect to a large degree this cultural tension between the artistic theories of Classicism and Romanticism. We are fortunate, we the whole community of golfers, to have both types of artists working productively in our time. The variety of courses available to us is literally a national treasure. Go find the courses you like, and play them all you want. Look too at courses you think you might not like; perhaps exposure to works you've kept away from, because of your biases against names and reputations, will surprise you most pleasantly. If not, you'll at least know what you like and why you like it. However, a broad catholicity of taste is desirable in golf courses as in any of the arts.
In matters of taste, there can be plenty of civilized discussions, but there should be no hating.