Robert wrote: "It would be interesting for one of our GCA history buffs to trace the origins of that maintenance meld as it relates to mowing scheme philosophy. Would the path lead back to the Chicago School under RB Harris and his focus on design for maintenance?"
Robert,
Harris designed his fairway perimeters to run close to his bunkering. His average fairway width was around 50 yards wide. And as early as 1966 he was specifying bentgrass seed on fairways. But the irrigation contractor that he worked closely with, Scotty Stewart, designed a manual watering system that would only cover 30 yards wide. Subsequently the fairway mowing operations would move inwards to the throw of water and that left a gap between the fairway and the fairway bunkering.
Harris also designed an apron encircling the green that was cut by a tractor drawn 7 gang mower. When the equipment manufacturers developed alternatives to the tractor drawn gang mower, the apron cut was also contracted from 15 foot width to a 5 foot width, and this accentuated the hour-glass shaped mower pattern at the approach.
I don't know if we can say that Harris presided over a "Chicago-School" design philosophy - many of his associates went on to be very successful architects on their own, but to my knowledge none of those men continued with Harris' penchant for building huge saucer shaped bunkers. They did however build bunkers around greens that were, as Cornish puts it: "in proportion to one another and in harmony with the landscape", and many of those bunkers were very large.
I suppose that whole issue of scale was owing mostly to the big bulldozers that were being used in that era to build golf course features with the best economy.