"Is there a distinction to be made between whether a designer considered things "scientifically" and whether he made full fledged architectural drawings? I would have thought you could do the former without the latter."
Richard Phinney:
To your question I would say, not necessarily. I think one could do the former without the latter and ironically today some prefer to do it that way without using highly detailed preconstruction drawings or being locked into them. One really good example would seemingly be Bill Coore. He certainly is capable of doing detailed enough pre-construction drawings (although he sometimes seems to deny that
) but often says he would prefer not to unless something like a permitting entity demands them.
Matter of fact, personally I don't know that I would even describe the way Coore designs holes and courses as "scientific," at least in the way I think of scientific in some of its more extreme applications and degrees. I say that because once I was walking Hidden Creek with the project foreman and I started talking about some of the nuancy strategies on some holes and the project manager said he thought Bill had gone beyond strategy. When I asked him what he meant by that he said that he felt Bill might have gotten into dabbling with randomness just to see what would happen and how it might work out in play.
If one wants to call that "scientific" then that's their opinion but I might prefer to say it is only scientific in that it is a real acknowledgement of the randomness of Nature itself which is not something I'd call "scientific," at least not in the way I'm contemplating it and using the term and philosophy on here about golf course architecture.