"TomP...in my particular situation a direct connection between the AC, LA and GCA would not be offensive ....I work and design in the three areas by preference and I have a true appreciation for all of them, but......"
PaulC:
In my opinion, a direct connection between GCA and LA or even AC is not offensive either. That's never been my point in this discussion or debate or whatever one wants to call it. My only point has been that there has never been a significant influence on golf course architecture (Golden Age or otherwise) by the "Arts and Crafts" Movement per se.
Of course it's true that some landscape designers such as Gertrude Stein may've been influenced by the A/C movement in various ways in her art form of landscape design but that does not mean that GCA was influenced by the A/C movement. That becomes particularly obvious when one considers the fact that a number of the significant architects of the Golden Age directly mentioned the influence on their golf architectural philosophies and principles to landscape designers that PRECEDED the A/C Movement by over a century.
Of course those landscape designers the GCAers attributed as influencing them were the first to shift the look and style of their art form from the rigid formality that preceded them to a style and look of far more naturalism in their art form of landscape design.
This was the connection of landscape design's influence on GCA in a naturalistic sense. The GCA that preceded the Golden Age of golf architecture (so-called "Dark Ages" in GB and the so-called "Geometric" age in the USA) was formality and rigidity and rudimentariness at its peak in GCA. The reasons for that early style and look is a wholly separate question---and one that is very worthy of discussion!
You said;
"I just cannot accept from all that I've read and observed, that one was built on the shoulders of the other.... anymore than ceramics was built on the shoulders of the foundry arts which was built on the shoulders of glass making."
I certainly can't accept that naturalistic GCA was built on the shoulders of the A/C movement for the obvious reasons given just above but I can appreciate the influence landscape designers such as Repton, Brown, Puckler etc had on Golden Age GCA in the way of applied "naturalistic" principles! One only needs to read what such as Macdonald and Behr wrote about that to understand the validity of it.
The Golden Age of golf architecture was the first time man-made architecture applied the look and feel of Nature itself to its incipient art form. This was not some revival of an earlier art form such as Gothic architecture that the Pre-Raphaelites, the A/C Movment, the Aesthetic Movement et al were attempting to BRING BACK to their art forms.
Golf course architecture could not have had such a revival because it did not exist as an art form or even a concept previously! The linksland courses that preceded golf course architecture by sometimes centuries were not an art form, they were simply Nature itself.
All these realities are proof enough that the A/C Movement could not possibly have been the significant influence on GCA or Golden Age GCA that Tom MacWood is attempting to prove it was.
Any researcher has only to understand and apply these historic facts, as well as their obvious time-lines to understand the truth and historical accuracy of this.
"Carry on brother...."
I will, and you do too because there isn't any good reason at all that anyone interested in this subject should buy into or even be impressed in the slightest by this kind of blatant historical revisionism.
What Tom MacWood has done here or tried to do is to try to EXPAND the A/C movement into something it was NOT. He's trying to enlarge and expand its impact and existence into such a universal and broad philosophy---actually he even went farther than "a philosophy" and labelled it "an approach"---that he can then attempt to fit almost anything (such as GCA) into it and to claim that consequently almost anytihng can be seen to have been significantly influenced by it, such as golf course architecture.
That's what he's tried to do in his essay and particularly in his line of opinion in all these discussions of the A/C Movement and its significant influence on GCA. Of course he can try to do that---he can try practically any line of reasoning but there's no question in my mind and I'm sure in yours and others that due to our catechism of his "thesis" and his "theory" both he and his thesis and theory have been proven to be historically inaccurate and therefore unsupportable.
But despite all that, I do believe the subject of the influence of "landscape architecture" (perhaps formerly called "landscape design") on both the golf course architecture of the "Golden Age" but particularly far more on the "Modern Age" of golf course architecture is a most fascinating and important topic to discuss.
As Bob Crosby (and me) mentioned pages and pages ago one cannot help but notice that much of the curriculum of golf course architecture as taught today is based on "landscape Architecture" principles or even "art" principles. One only needs to read Cornish and Whitten's important tome "The Architects of Golf" to understand that.
Despite the fact that the A/C Movement did not have a significcant influence on the GCA of the Golden Age the more important subject of whether some of its principles could have an important influence on some golf architecture of the future is still very much worth discussing, in my opinion.
Obviously we are in the midst of a "renaissance" in some areas of golf architecture today and this would be the time to consider these questions for the future.