Thoughtful integration of design elements, interesting green complexes and reasonable length without the need to protect par is necessary to broaden the appeal of this great game and encourage players to return to the true nature of the sport. The reduction of convoluted feature design strategies are married directly to the successful decline of rising golf course costs in modern maintenance techniques.
Answers to questions about design, difficulty, challenge and playability will be difficult to find without understanding and reflecting upon the simple beauty of the game first … that playability and challenge aren’t linked to yardage, slope, ratings or par.
Golf was devised as a match play game, a game in which player enjoyment and social interaction was the pinnacle of a successful establishment. That simple truth will allow architects to generate fabulously satisfying and wonderfully strategic challenges for decades to come.
The rest of the article is well worth the reading time. And, it sums up as above...
I am in agreement with everything Mr. MacKellar has written in his essay.
I would take the future or forward looking guestimations and pontifications a step further and say that golf is reflecting the results of the same sort of 'irrational exhuberance' that all financial and economic sectors are displaying and must now go through. That is painful contraction. As Mr. MacKellar points out the hyper-marketted signature golf design with associated high life real estate projects integrally attached to these costly courses; all that must contract as a matter of rational market corrections. Golf will contract and die IMHO in many sectors or strata where it has been overbuilt and overmarketted now. Only the very well heeled and insulated ultra wealthy and paid up clubs, or meek or lean will survive to service whatever masses of golfers will stick with the game, if the world economic mess plays out for a lengthy time. Many CCFAD and high end RE projects may be toast. That is no different than what happened to golf in the depression era of 1930s.
I think a lot of designer/players who are involved with high ticket marketed course like Mr. MacKellar speaks will go away. They may even go away if purses on their player side of the equations shrink, and for sure will go away from design if only the smartest and most clever, environmentally sensitive and minimalist real architects hang on by a thread, via perhaps the small market of remodelling work, and very few new works that may result in much harder financial times, should the economy sink lower.
I honestly don't think most people in the golf industry really have a significant and future/forward looking vision, and are still dellusional about what may be coming. The mega projects like Dubai stuff, or that Tiger design in Baja California-Mexico are the last contractions of what may be a dying industry overall for a long time to come. And, these off-shore enclaves may be the last refuge of scoundrels fleeing what they wrought in our institutions with this goofy extravagant activity here as they bail out to safe harbors. But, all the safe harbors and retreat enclaves won't keep many of the multitudes of archies employed. Only the lucky, and cleaver will survive, IMHO.