"Tom,
Excellent point, but it depends on how elastic the word "restoration."
Gib:
That too is an excellent point, albeit one that comes up on here so often it has almost become a general theme on this website.
Perhaps this website or a number of its contributors, and some of its very best too, need to step back and take a few deep breaths when it relates to the entire concept and practice of so-called "restoration" architecture.
Perhaps we all need to sit back and look at when this entire phase (fad?) of restoration of classic courses began, and why it began---and what it has accomplished in the last 15 or so years, as well as what it has not accomplished or what it has wrought.
My sense is that before perhaps 1990 the entire concept was never done, never even heard of----the word itself was just not applied to golf course architecture.
But it most certainly is now.
The most important thing to consider, I guess, is not just what it has accomplished to date but in what stage of its cycle do we suppose it is in now.
Can future restorations be even better than the best of what we have seen to date, and if so, how? I don't see why not but how would that be? What about applied maintenance practices that make them play more like they were intended to and not just architectural projects and master plans that make them look sort of what they used to look like? What about the whole idea of "holding a look" into the future---something that certainly has never been done or perhaps even considered?
There's at least one or a few on this board who seem to concentrate on carping against architects who restore courses by claiming they are nothing more than redesigners cloaked as restoration architects.
While I see that point and do understand the details of what is being said I don't really like the gist. We know what redesigners are for Christ's Sake as we are aware of the decades of redesigns that took place on classic courses with no mind whatsoever to the themes and styles and actual function in play of the architecture of original designers and some of the best in history.
And I doubt any of us can deny that this recent restoration wave has renewed and rekindled pride and interest and a willingness to reeducate ourselves in who those old architects were and what those old architects were up to, what they were thinking and were attempting to accomplish.
America is unique it seems in this way---it rushes forward so fast and so far into so many new and different things. But occassionally in the area of style and culture it seems to stop and then look back to some former time. Why is that and what can we learn from it?
We are doing that now with classic architecture of particularly the Golden Age, an undeniably interesting and perhaps great time and era in golf architecture's fascinating evolution.
We have looked back at it with real interest and we will look back at it even deeper, I'm sure. What will we have taken from it when this restoration wave or phase or fad finally runs its course, if in fact it ever does?
That's the question.
My hope is we will take the essence and the best of its most multi-optional concepts that really do function in play to be sensed by more golfers as their very own unique strategies. Ironically, I think some of our modern and current architects have done just that and perhaps even better than the best of the Golden Age.
My hope is that we will take from it some of what was obviously the joy and mystery of its unpredictableness and that this time it must be viewed and maintained into the future as a distinct style and look and function "in play" and not be homogenized again, as it has been in the past, into some other architectural style to come or again into some "one size fits all" maintenance practices (how American golf managed to wipe out the function of the ground game, perhaps 1/3 to 1/2 of the game of golf in the last fifty years without regretting it or apparently even noticing it is just beyond me).
Maybe the most important word and concept in the future will be the one you used above regarding the WORD restoration, and on that which it may depend---eg "elasticity".
Maybe that's what we need to restore in architecture and not just in the linear sense of total distance as we have done so much of in the past.
Maybe we need to put more of the elasticity of seasonality back into the maintenance and treatment of this distinct type and style and era of architecture, the way it once was because that was the only way it could be back then---not the least reason being because that is the everlasting way of Nature itself.