In my experience at Riviera Pat Mucci is certainly right--I had to play it to comment on the some of what is being talked about here---I didn't play it. I started a 6am and walked very slowly from #1 to #18 looking at every single thing, taking ever little detail in and also the overall aura of the course, and fortunately talking to the super as I progressed along.
So my take on Riviera would be not the same as those who know it well--but it was very unusual and very impressive for me nonetheless doing what I did.
I could certainly see the strategic possibilities and the little nuances everywhere. But what really struck me and impressed me was the canyon site, which should have created almost a feeling of claustrophobia for someone like me from the East who is not used to that. But it didn't--it created in that way no more than a feeling of coziness (I could have touched the lady in her yard from #6 tee, I felt).
But one would think even a feeling of coziness on a golf course would make the golfer feel somewhat restricted in both feeling and actually hitting his golf shots. The fact that it felt quite open and expansive that way in such a close coupled routing is what impressed me. It has to be an illusion, a brilliant deception on Thomas's part--and I just love all things in arhictecture that create visual or aura deception!
But I would have gone all the way to LA just to see #10 in person, and it did not disappoint. For a golf archtiectural addict there are two short par 4s that fascinated me the most from an architectural perspective--Cypress's #9 and Riviera's #10. They are at either end of the spectrum in the context of an architectural "workup".
#9 Cypress for those who have really studied the pre and post construction photos is an absolutely natural golf hole. Everything that's there was there before construction--Mackenzie just gently layed on the tee, fairway and green and that was it. What was naturally there before is fascinating in how he used it!
Riviera's #10 had to be a completely blank canvas originally--offering the architect almost nothing to use naturally, except a tiny bit of elevation change. What he did with it in both design and construction is about as good as it can get!
Both ends of the architectural spectrum--one completely found, the other completely made. I might prefer #9 Cypress to look at, but to play I definitely would prefer Riviera's #10!
And I do agree with those that say Riviera is a world class architectural labratory! As such it's hard to see people mess with it.
There's one other thing about Thomas that fascinates me more than any other architect. That was his penchant to create mini-loops and "courses within a course" (that Lynn Shackelford alluded to above). It's understandable that he would have tried to do something like that on a small site and a close coupled routing (his other LA courses too) but ironically in an architectural sense that's the most difficult canvas to do it on!
Thomas may have been the most brilliant or the most adventurous architect of them all, although some of his ideas did not catch on or did not really last. He seems to me to be the most interesting architectural theoretician of all!
At least one of his unique ideas--"courses within a course" should be reanalyzed today seriously!
If that could be done (perhaps necessarily on a larger scale site) in what I think of as a "Rohrshach" presentation where the courses within a course would only actually appear to the golfer as only one when he was playing any one of them (the others would deceptively and totally fade from view, if you know what I mean), that to me might be the ultimate design in one particular way. To do it really well, I think, would take tremendous talent in imagination, design and construction ability!