Tom, I found this from Desmond in hopes it may further shine a little more information:
When I first started to design golf courses I was interested in their integration into the surrounding community as at Mission Hills in California and Boca West in Florida. After that I was primarily concerned with the quality of golf and the need to give the course a collection of sound golfing principles, including a careful relationship to earth form and wind, together with length, rhythm and playability. My Scottish connection told me that the tradition of golf was plebeian as well as royal; that the game should be made available to working men as well as aristocrats, to high handicappers as well as scratch amateurs and professionals. I like to say that I provide a violin, that you can play any tune you like on it in any key, and that we should always aim for a Stradivarius.
In recent years after a ten year hiatus from golf architecture, while searching for an idea to make it more appealing and less repetitious, I rediscovered symbols. The Old Course at St. Andrews is full of them; bunkers called Hell and Lionsmouth, depressions called the Valley of Sin. I decided to make these symbols over overt and more literal and to attempt to make them into genuine art forms. I found a mermaid on the 11th at Aberdeen in Florida; Jason and the Argonauts in "Clashing Rocks," the 7th at Stone Harbor, New Jersey. A Japanese fan in the 7th at Shinyo in Nagoya, Japan. There were two women in the 6th hole at Long Lake Hill in Korea, a dragon in the 1th at Oak village near Tokyo, Japan, and so on.
These symbols were hard to forget. If memorability is an important aspect of golf architecture, you could remember all eighteen holes just by walking these courses. Among other ideas I added a theme, perceptions from gestalt psychology and a new concept orientation points which told you where you were. Every hole was different. There were eighteen signature holes instead of one. I believe that this has opened a door in the practice of the golf course design.
These golf holes with their sculptural forms led me out of golf course architecture into earth form art. Because of this, I am enjoying golf architecture far more than ever before. In the past I have had to design the surrounding community, even the houses to keep interested. At Boca West and McCormick Ranch it was this relationship which was almost as important as the golf course. Now I can concentrate on the golf course although we still design the surrounding community.
Today my designs may show a broad field of influences but relatively few of them are from golf. They are more often from art and opera, from poetry, philosophy and psychology. From Van Gogh, Uccello and Miro and their forms that stalk our dreams. I owe some allegiance to Moore and Lipschitz, Wagner and Donizetti, Sartres and Wittgenstein, Adler and Jung. I am fascinated by their symbols and archetypes and the associations they give off.
This type of design is not for everybody. These symbols have to have an authentic sense of art and an intelligent explainable reason for being there. There is a thin line between art and kitsch. Badly used and executed symbols become an embarrassment. Well-wrought symbols need content as well as form, essence as well as existence. Like Jung's symbols I wanted mine to have greater power than the experience they came from. Some of them like the 7th at Stone Harbor have almost limitless energy. Suddenly the whole course has acquired an underlying mystique developed from the mystery and the reality of the site.
I am often asked about the design of a great course. One can never design a great course, that takes time, adjustments, famous shots, competitive rounds, memorable tournaments. But we can always design a unique course, an original course, a course that is different.
Design in any field is a fruit of slow maturing. A great golf course evolves gradually like a tall tree filling out its branches. All we architects can do is to lay the foundations. A truly great golf course has an existential, intellectual underpinning, yet fills the senses. It is joyful, tragical, magical, mythical, rational, empirical. Such a course has great power and tenderness.
I only know of one truly great golf course. The Old Course at St. Andrews in Scotland. It is at least five hundred years old. We newcomers can only hope that time will be as kind to our courses as it has been to the Old Course.
A unique course on the other hand requires originality, imagination, innovation; and this is where the need for art becomes most formidable. Art is a river both deep and infinitely wide. For those of us on the cutting edge, the river flows fast and you get caught up in it. Some of us swim against the current. There is rough water, rocks, rapids. Your experiments may be unfairly criticized, even pilloried, but there is a liberating sense of triumph when the trials are surmounted. And the way is filled with excitement, happiness, new friends and laughter. The innovator - if he lives long enough - usually also gets the last laugh, and that's the one worth having.
I like to quote Winston Churchill on the subject: "An art without a tradition is like a flock of sheep without a shepherd, but an art without innovation is a corpse."