Tom MacWood said:
“The penal school of architecture was invented by golf architects to label other golf architects they didn't care for or agree with. No one ever claimed to be associated with the penal school of golf architecture.”
That remark seems to have been taken from or borrowed from Bob Crosby’s excellent essay on here entitled Joshua Crane, that is essentially an examination in much greater detail of the so-called Joshua Crane/Behr and Mackenzie Debate that was cast back then as the Strategic School vs the Penal School of architecture, although as Bob Crosby outlines below, it really wasn’t that or just that-----it was a good deal more and more complex set of issues:
“Joshua Crane In The Golden Age, Part IV
by Bob Crosby
A Postscript:
Why the Penal v Strategic Architecture Distinction is the Wrong One; A Modest Proposal for a Better One; Or Why Joshua Crane Helps to Make Sense of It All
There are a number of reasons why revisiting the Crane debates is worth the candle. Among them is that the debates help untangle a number of thorny issues in the long-lived contrast between “penal” versus “strategic” architecture. What follows explores how the Crane debates help to sort out some of those issues and how they suggest a better way to distinguish fundamental differences in architecture philosophies.
As will be recalled, Crane deeply resented the “penologist” tag that Behr and MacKenzie gave him. It’s a safe bet that it was one the things they argued about when they got together in St Andrews in the summer of 1929. Crane thought the tag had been concocted solely to belittle him and his ideas. Objecting to MacKenzie’s use of the term, Crane wrote, “This is a direct literary piracy of Max Behr’s classification of golf architects where the goats are put in the ‘Penal School,’ and the sheep in the “Strategic School.” A pretty way of attributing false sentiments to an opponent then proceeding to condemn him therefor.”
In the last years of the Golden Age it was taken as an article of faith that the two schools were locked in combat. All of the era’s best books had set piece confrontations between good guy strategic architects and bad guy penal architects.[1] These books were not neutral, expository guides to golf architecture. Little attempt was made to give a balanced overview of different design philosophies. To the contrary, when the authors turned to philosophies of golf design, these books read like position papers in a heated argument and they all took the same side of the argument. Three decades or so later Robert Trent Jones revived many of the same themes, endowing the penal v. strategic distinction with the canonical status it currently enjoys. The distinction is today a core concept in golf architecture.
But the distinction’s long life ought to be seen as surprising. First, it’s never been clear who exactly the advocates for penal architecture were. If you’ve gotten through the earlier parts of this essay you know that Crane wasn’t one – at least not the one depicted by his opponents. But it’s not just about Crane. Architects boasting of their penal designs have always been scarce on the ground. As Tom Simpson noted in 1929, “..every golf architect, if he were asked the question to which school he belonged, would profess to be strategical.” Penal architecture is not a banner which many people have flown. MacKenzie and Behr notwithstanding, the penal school is a school without alumni.
But it isn’t just that penal architecture is an idea without a following. The concept itself is a muddle, one that obscures more than it clarifies. Given the origins of the term, that’s not surprising. Most of what we know about penal architecture we’ve learned from its opponents, architects like Behr, MacKenzie, Simpson and others. Their depictions tended to be less than even-handed – even cartoonish – for all the obvious rhetorical reasons.[2] Their strawman caricatures, however, ended up shaping modern understandings of the term. What people think they know today about penal architecture tends to be what MacKenzie and others told us it was. In short, the strategic/penal divide is not only one in which the identity of the antagonists is unclear, the meaning typically ascribed to one of its key terms is something about which we ought to be very skeptical.
The Crane debates help to clarify not only what’s wrong with the distinction, they also suggest a better way to parse fundamental differences in architectural philosophies. The debates tell us that seeing fundamental differences in design philosophies as turning on a distinction between strategy and penalty is misleading, both conceptually and as a matter of history. What has really been afoot over the years is a different sort of disagreement. A better antonym of strategic architecture is not penal architecture but rather something akin to Crane’s actual views – something like Crane’s CP&P principles. A better framework for seeing historic debates over basic design philosophies is to see them as debates between, on the one hand, strategic architecture and what might be called “equitable architecture” on the other.
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