What features draw you to the work of your favorite architect? (and vice versa)

[Dan Herrmann]

What features draw you to the work of your favorite architect?  How do they differentiate his work from his peers?

Conversely, what features of your least favorite architect drive you away from his work?

I'll start..
   I love Gil's work - the sense of drama that comes about due to his routing and sense of intimacy on a grand scale is tough to beat.

   I don't like the work of Rees Jones' design firm.  It just seems too "cookie cutter" and boring for me.

[Jim Eder]

For me it is the bunkering and the strategy (the hills/slopes etc) of George Thomas and Billy Bell.

[Melvyn Morrow]

  The Scottish Accent

  Melvyn

[Adrian_Stiff]

I like the fact that my courses are always easy to maintain.

[Harris Nepon]

I'm a huge fan of Stanley Thompson design here in Canada. Due to very little experience with the links style courses I tend to like parkland the best. Thompson courses tend to be older and set on magnificent land with every hole lined with the good kind of trees  . I like the change in elevation throughout his courses. I find the greens to be interesting in relation to their size and the variation of pin positions.

My 2 cents.

[John Moore II]

This is quite an interesting take. I might say my favorite designer is Mike Strantz and the reason for that is I like how "strange" his courses are. They are all somewhat different from what else can be seen in golf. And I like that.

As far as what turns me away from a course it all depends. I don't have a least favorite designer as I feel that some type of merit can be taken from almost any course and designer. Everyone builds a bad course or two, but that does not make then wholly bad designers. Often times we condemn courses and designers as bad not knowing the orders from the owners or legal restrictions on the site. Basically there is no designer that I like specifically for name, though Strantz does come close and certainly none I dislike solely because of name.

[Phil_the_Author]

How Tilly sculpted his courses to the particular piece of land upon which they are built while maintaining certain design principles. For example, his green entrances and how they define both the undulations of the putting surface and location of the hazards as well as the location of where the proper shot to be played into the green should be played from.

[Keith OHalloran]

I realize that this is like saying I like the Yankees, But C & C would be my vote. What gets me is the short, drivable par 4 that can also send you to the next tee demoralized. I specifically love the 7th at Sand Hills and the 6th at Friars.

I seem to dislike Greg Norman courses. The ones that I have played all seem very "tricky" and "gimmicky" sorry that I can't further describe that right now, the Yankees are on!

[Sev K-H Keil]

Nothing wrong about rooting for the Yankees...

I'm a big fan of Harry Colt. There's always a special enjoyment factor when playing his courses (somehow similar to the current work by C&C and TD) --- the HC feature I appreciate (and that stands out) the most is his diagonal cross-bunkering.

[David_Elvins]

Greens with great combination of dramatic and subte internal contour do it for me.

However it is hard to select an individual feature because architects that get this right (Doak, MacKenzie, C&C, Maxwell, Flynn), tend to get most other things that I like right too - width, naturalness, variety of hole length, short game options.

Conversly a course with flat greens will generally be long, monotonous and unatural looking.  And a course with tricked up greens will be over shaped and over bunkered as well. 
 

[Sean_A]

I don't know if Fowler is my favourite architect, but I greatly admire his work.  To me, he is the only one of the great classic era designers (and of the modern ones as well) who truly maximized the use of the land in a manner which didn't leave any sort of Fowler stamp on the courses.  This is so much the case that NONE of Fowler's courses look similar to my eye; they are all of themselves.  It sounds simple, but this is a remarkable feat.  I am far from disliking Colt because he created a load of wonderful courses and holes, plus the guy could go in any direction of design he wanted and produce a good product.  I don't know of a Colt course which is a complete miss - there will always be something worth seeing.  However, once you play enough of his courses they often start to look similar.  This is partly due to the quantity of courses he built and likely in part to using the same builders for a great many projects.  Another aspect of the similarity of design may not be down to Colt and that is the bunkering.  I suspect he was more course specific with bunkering styles at least with some of his well known projects and yet today there is a much of a muchness feel about the bunkering of Colt courses.  Regardless, unlike Fowler, Colt seemed to put his stamp on a large percentage of the courses he designed and this is usually around the greens; specifically the use of plateaux style, with framing mounds and few interior contours.  The one area I think Colt was brilliant in was reworking courses.  He seemed able to work in his more modern design concepts seemlessly with more Victorian architecture.  An important part of this was Colt's willingness to allow some funky stuff to remain even if he may not have personally approved; this approach was incredibly far sighted.

Ciao