JC:
I think we talked about a number of things today that bear on the subject of your thread here.
I'm OK with most people's definition of architecture but what interests me the most is not what we say about it on GOLFCLUBATLAS but what others have. Cornish and Whiten seem to pick Alan Robertson as the first architect and what he did at TOC in 1848 as the first example of man-made architecture (the Road Hole green and Road Hole bunker). However, I could certainly see someone legitimately attributing the first example of golf architecture to whomever just arranged a series of holes consisting of fairways and greens (before about 1875 the Rules of Golf did not even allow for separate tee areas other than club lengths from the previous hole) without doing a thing to the land with earthmoving and making features.
But what I think is more indicative is what others in the past thought it was or said it was. In that vein, I particularly note C.B. Macdonald. He wrote in his book that he thought he was the first golf course architect and presumably with NGLA. If he said that one most certainly does need to consider why he would say something like that given the fact a man like Macdonald was certainly as familiar as any at that time about the entire history of golf and what we call architecture.
Therefore he certainly could not have been denying the existence of all the courses that came before NGLA including TOC, all the good courses abroad and the likes of Myopia, Chicago GC and GCGC which were often mentioned as the three best in America early on or the three top ones before NGLA or say around 1910?
So, what could he have meant then when he said he was the first golf architect he was aware of?
I think he may've meant he was the first he was aware of who was actually attempting to copy existing holes or their significant architectural principles and therefore it was necessary to perhaps really move some earth to accomplish that. On the other hand if one really studies the likes of Myopia or GCGC that came before NGLA there really is a whole lot of what one would call "natural landform design" out there.
I also told you I couldn't really imagine he would engage a surveyor/engineer full time with NGLA if he did not intend to do some preconstruction surveying (contour mapping) in preparation for some significant earthmoving and building. After-all that is what engineers and surveyors do.
My next point to you was the one about who the first person in golf architecture was who used a PRE-construction topo (contour) survey map for PRE-construction design purposes. At the moment the earliest one I can find a reference to is ironically Merion East in 1911 but on reviewing Macdonald's book again it appears he is referring to the same thing at the beginning of NGLA when he talks about what Raynor did with contour maps and even if Macdonald did not use the term "preconstuction" what he actually said leaves almost NO doubt that is what he was referring to.
To wit:
"Employing him to survey our Sebonac Neck property, I was so much impressed with his dependbility and seriousness I had him make a contour map and later gave him my surveyor's maps which I had brought back from Scotland and England, telling him that I wanted those holes laid out faithfully to those maps.
When it came to accurate surveying, contours, plastic relief models of the land, draining, piping water in quantity over the entire course, wells and pumps, and in many instances clearing land of forests, eradicating the stones, finally preparing the course for seeding, he had no peer."
Is that why Macdonald called himself the first golf course architect----eg because he was the first to think of using a PRE-construction contour maps for architectural planning because being the first to actually come up with the idea to comprehensively copy existing holes in architecture he knew he would have to get into more earthmoving to do it than anyone ever had before in golf architecture?
And then what he said to the MCC Search Committee in June 1910 about the fact he could tell them no more without a contour map before him really got me wondering if perhaps Macdonald and NGLA had been the first to ever use something like that in architecture again leading him to think of that as the first real "architecture" and himself as the first "architect" he was aware of.
I know it will be a maddenly hard research mission to truly document the very first example of PRE-construction contour mapping to be used for design purposes before anything is done to a site, but I think that is what we will need to do now or next.
I put a thread on here some time ago about the significance of PRE-construction topo (contour line) survey maps. Very few responded and I think the reason was they did not connect with the significance of it in the history and evolution of golf course architecture. Before that golf course architects probably just worked on the ground routing and designing and never really recorded any of what they were doing out there ro going to do with any drawings until perhaps some time after the fact and then prehaps just for illustrative reasons to hang on a wall somewhere.
By the way, I do not consider "stick routings" on paper (like that thing Barker called a "rough sketch" of the Ardmore land for HDC developer Joseph Connell) to be even remotely similar to PRE-construction topo maps with golf holes on them unless and until they actually have "contour lines" on them. The former only represents two dimension---length and width, while the latter represents the all important dimension of height or the vertical dimension. It may seem simple to us today but I bet it sure didn't to them back in the last decade of the 19th century and the first decade of the 20th in golf course architecture!