This doesn't address Jordan's initial question, or have anything specifically to do with Chambers Bay. But it's just so good I wanted to find a place to share it:
"Nature was gracious and kind when it spread before our forefathers that peculiar undulating ground known as linksland which the receding sea had left, as it were, especially designed as a playground for golf. Even the rabbits which infested its sandy soil and the sheep which roamed its hills and hollows were put there, it would seem, to crop the grass which throve so delicately in this newborn soil. The softness of the sea air, the purity of vegetation, the distant horizon and spring of turf under foot, all went to present a beguiling aspect of Nature in its vastness and its simplicity. And the idea that man projected into these surroundings was as simple. To strike a little ball and consecrate the task by playing it into a little hole was as naïve an enterprise, and yet as ominous, as the patient struggle of vegetation to conquer the white army of the booming deep among the dunes.
So lovable was this adventure that man was not content to pursue it apart in its natural habitation, but must needs transport it to situations unaccommodating to its playing. But to transport it he had to commit sacrilege – he had to analyze it, tear it to pieces the more easily to pack it in his mind. And, in so doing, he did not realize that what he carried away with him was the letter only, and that he left behind something intangible, that property of unsullied nature, innocent beauty undefiled as yet by the hand of man.
It was inevitable that his first review of linksland golf should have engendered a type of architecture which disclosed a conscious adhesion to a formal order of things. It was not to be expected that the mind would immediately seize the sensuous appeal of native golf. Hence, it was not considered in the construction of our first inland courses. The natural architecture of linksland, passed through the sieve of the mind, came out utilitarian in aspect and mathematical in form. The novice at landscape gardening cannot see the planting of trees otherwise than in rows, nor the lawn in front of his house otherwise than in a series of terraces. The conscious mind delights in the fitness of things, in the easily comprehensible, and thus dwells on the surface of phenomena.
Indeed, appearances are never transferable. They are always the produce of certain relations which exist once, and are only appropriate to a certain condition. Hence, the impossibility of transferring the aspect of linksland. This had to be left behind. But that which in linksland appealed unconsciously to the golfer was the absence of any evidence of man’s handiwork. He was in the presence of Nature unstained by artificiality.
The merit of this gradually came to be realized. Its recognition is revealed in the efforts now being made to achieve naturalness in construction of the various features that go to make up a golf course. The straight line has well-nigh disappeared from out bunkers, tees and greens. They are acquired curves. Without doubt this phase is more pleasing to the eye. But the arbitrary manner in which we continue to deal with these components makes them manifest an individuality apart from their surroundings. We have succeeded in prettifying them, but we remain under the delusion that what is pretty, or picturesque, is beautiful."
Peter
Edit: The quote is Max Behr's. I think the last few words are especially good: "we remain under the delusion that what is pretty, or picturesque, is beautiful". I'm just guessing, but I think Behr is talking about "the beautiful" sort-of like the old Greeks talked about it, i.e. as being in the natural order of things; or maybe how genius physicists talk about some huge complex theory being true because it's beautiful.