"I think we are getting somewhere.
Clear a field and leave creeks, ponds, ungrassed areas as you find them. Throw nine darts at your topo and put your greens there. Build flat areas near the greens to be used as tees.
Then let golfers route and reroute their own course. You could play an entirely different course everyday. It would be your preferred course, the one you opted to play. The downside is that only one group could play the course at one time.
Everyday would be a new, unpredictable adventure in golf."
Bob:
I've thought for a number of years now that that would be perhaps the ultimate expression in golf course architecture.
To do something like that, however, would require a certain type of site with certain necessary characteristics (a very treed site would make it virtually impossible).
I refer to that kind of thing as "courses within a course" and to do it well and to do it with real multiplicity would probably be two, three, four, five, six, seven etc times more complex than doing a single golf course.
The real key, in my opinion, to do something like that to the ultimate would be to pull it off in such a way that any particular iteration would look to the golfer playing it like it was the only one (that he wouldn't be that aware of the other iterations).
The basic idea would need to be something like a Rorhschach design.
This is the kind of direction that the otherworldy imaginative George Thomas may've been going in before quiting the business and going back to being a world-class rosarian.
