TE, Bradley -
This may sidetrack this discussion, but your last couple of posts brought it to mind. It's one of the main reasons I'm interested in these kind of threads, and is the subject of many of my questions around here. Those questions are basically about the fundamental principles of good golf course architecture - what they are, when they were first consciously recognized and/or articulated, whether or not those have changed over the years or just been partially hidden (or sometimes buried) under various and changing styles and tastes, and most of all what we mean or should mean when we talk about architects and their designs, i.e. how 'credit' for the design should be parceled out given the relative (and changing?) importance of the 'conceptual' aspect of design. I asked recently about today's architects who learned their craft by getting their hands dirty (i.e. beginning on the construction side as young interns working for established designers), and I wondered about the old greats who (mostly) didn't start out that way. There were a number of good replies, and I quote a snippet of one from Tom D:
"I think that knowledge of construction today is much more important than before because there are so many parts of a course that weren't even in the budget 75 years ago ... heavy earthmoving, drainage, irrigation, cart paths, etc. In fact there is so much of that, that some guys forget to design cool golf holes as in the old days, when the latter was the single focus of golf course design."
So, to my point, which is that if this was as true 100 years ago as it was 75 years ago, and if design back then was (and could be) mainly about designing "cool holes", how does this change (or confirm) who we think did what back in the old days. Specifically, does it mean that the architect in a case like Myopia was the man who conceptualized the cool holes? TE - if any of this makes sense, is it something that feeds into the amateur-sportsman idea? That is, is it more likely that men like Leeds and Wilson and Crump etc were interested in and aware of (and could afford to learn and be informed about) the principles that make for cool golf holes or that the early professionals were?
Peter