What are the Common Characteristics of The Early Inland Style of Golf Design?
-- Uniform, Straight edged cop bunkers (actually a "cop" hill or mound designed to catch the ball, with a "bunker" just short of the cop) running across the fairway from one side of the hole to the other. Usually spaced at fairly specific and uniform distances from the tee.
-- Depending on the length of the hole, a second cop bunker placed approximately 20 yds short of the green, designed to catch mishit approaches.
-- Few bunkers around the greens.
-- Little or no effort to blend man-made features into the existing landscape. Features appear uniform, industrial, man-made.
-- Round or square greens, or oval for the really adventuresome. Sometimes flattened or terraced on RR ties, sometimes set into the existing ground with existing undulations.
-- Trap bunkers, often shaped like rectangular flower beds, stationed on the edges of the fairways to "trap" hooks and slices.
-- Devoid of strategic features.
-- Focused purely on testing physical skill.
-- Did not "tend to the smallest improvement in the game of the player."
“Tom Paul,
You tell TomM that he is being too broad, and overplaying certain facts, then in the next breadth you tell me that the entire Early Inland style wasnt a product of the many specifics that TomM and I have listed, but rather all attributable to Max Behr's description of the complicated interworkings of man's mind?? Now there are some specific's for you!
Seriously, you might not want to hang your hat on Behr this time. A brief review of some of his written work convinces me that Behr and TomM were on the same page.
Adam does make some good points, unfortunately he fails to realize that much of what he describes is directly attributable to victorian industrialization, and therefor misses the significance of its rejection by the golf designers. You do the same thing. Take another look at my detailed response to Adam if you'd like to see what I am talking about.”
Dave:
When I said I thought TomM was being too broad, I was speaking about his attempt to include many different art forms (building architecture, furniture, all kinds of art and crafts such as glass forms, decorative art etc ) in some broad comparison to golf architecture and the primary influence on it in this early time. If you want to know what I’m specifically speaking of as to what I disagree with TomM on insofar as this primary influence on golf architecture he maintains just check out TomM’s description of William Morris’s overall intention or career effort. It appears he was attempting a collaborative effort to connect all art forms in his movement or otherwise. Personally and philosophically I don’t believe such a thing is a particularly good idea anyway and although Morris and the “Arts and Crafts” movement may’ve done that to some degree and perhaps to some degree broadly across various art forms, it clearly did not really last or take hold in some massive influence on various art forms, in my opinion. And, the art of golf architecture is one I don’t believe it really did. That’s what I mean as Tom MacW being to broad in the context of this particularly movement.
Behr, on the other hand in the quote in post #3 at least confined his explanation about early golf architecture removed from the linklsna to the subject of “games” or “Sport” which on might categorize as perhaps recreation. He primarily used tennis as an analogy of how man tends to define time and space in “games”. He juxtaposed that to linklsand golf which he felt must necessarily include nature’s randomness which he referred to as its ‘intangibles’. When golf first left the linksland and migrated to England and first to America he obviously felt it did not at first take that linksland natural randomness or a natural “intangibleness with it at first---at least not until Park Jr’s breakthrough in the Heathland at Sunningdale and Huntercombe.
“Yes you disagree, but not really in any sort of form which helps me further challenge my own views. With what specifically do you disagree?”
See my two paragraphs above.
”Do you disagree that the style of architecture I describe above as Early Inland was the dominant architecture of the late 1800's in inland Britan?”
I frankly don’t really know if what you describe above was the dominant architecture of the late 1800s in Britain. I’ve never seen photographs of all of it from that time and I’ve only seen a few courses in Britain anyway. One was Tom Dunn’s Ganton and if it looked originally anything like it does today I would surely never describe it’s architecture the way you did above. Logically it probably didn’t look like it does today when Dunn built is seeing as app eight other architects have worked on it since.
”Do you disagree that the style of architecture I describe above as Early Inland was the dominant architecture of the late 1800's and in the first part of the first decade of the 1900's in the United States?””
Again, I really don’t know what it generally looked like (if some style of architecture could be called “Dominant” in that age). I do know that various architecture did describe that era’s architecture as “Victorian”. I do not know if by that they mean some defined style or if they were just describing some simplicity and perhaps rudimentariness that existed at that particularly time (The age known as “Victorian”).
”Do you disagree that many of the characteristics of this Early Inland style were entirely consistent the approach to production in Industrialized Britan?”
‘Many of the characteristic’? I don’t know that I would say that. I realize you and TomM are saying that but that might be a stretch. I’d tend to subscribe to the theory explained by Behr that simplicity in straight line precision of this kind might be a far more inherent inclination of Man---not necessarily just British or Victorian.
”Do you disagree that designers we call Golden Age Architects explicitly rejected the Early Inland Style?”
I do not disagree with that. I think most did reject that early inland style---that which they came to refer to as “Victorian”, “Dark Age” and eventually “Geometric” architecture. Frankly, I sense that the highly “geometric” architecture exhibited at Annandale G.C. probably followed some highly simple or rudimentary architecture both the latter half of the 1800s in both Britain and America. Some of the early photos of England and America of that age look far more simple and bland and very little like that radical “lion’s teeth’, highly symmetrical “choclate drop” style found in the photo in GeoffShac’s book of the College Arms G.C. in Deland Florida. If there was anything like that in early British architecture I’m not aware of it.
”Do you disagree that designers we call Golden Age Architects looked to the pre-industrial links period for their inspiration as well as their formulaic (or lack thereof) and aesthetic exemplars?”
I don’t disagree with that at all. I think they most of them did that, the very best of them anyway, and the literature of the Golden Age and golf architecture’s evolution says that loud and clear over and over again. I’ve always said that throughout all these threads. The irony is the style of Raynor never exactly followed that highly natural aesthetic (but that’s another story!). What I am saying though, at least in the context of this subject about the influence of the A/C Movement, is that I don’t think it was primarily the influence of the A/C Movement that inspired them to look back at the natural linksland model as their inspiration. And, I’m not by that saying that the A/C Movement didn’t exist at all or didn’t have influence on other art forms---just not a primary influence on this shift in the aesthetic in golf architecture---at least not remotely to the extent Tom MacWood suggests----which is to an extent that he apparently thinks the “Golden Age” should be renamed “arts and crafts” architecture to be more descriptive of what it’s primary influence was.
(cont below)