"You may not agree with the text, but I think you have to agree that the magazines were a good deal more interesting for the golf course enthusiast in 1927.
Paul;
That's most definitely true. Can you imagine today's readers of Golf Digest magazine having the interest or sophistication to read through articles such as that?
As you know I'm a fan of Max Behr and a student of some of his thinking and philosophies to do with golf and architecture. That doesn't mean, though, that I agree with everything he said or even understand it. But I'm fascinated by the directions his thoughts took him and in the depths they went.
I believe more than ever now that Behr had to have been inspired in some of these basic architectural philosophies of his by the earlier writing of Arnold Haultain. It's just that Behr took some of what Haultain merely touched on and took it to some remarkable lengths in an a priori attempt to basically prove in a series of interconnected essays some underlying truths about golf, golfers and golf architecture.
His whole idea of the distinctions of golf as a "sport" and golf as a "game" and how that impacts golf architecture and golfers' reactions to it is really remarkable. This is the subject that Geoff Shackelford is reviewing and writing about now.
Behr was interested in a number of fundamentals and how they related to golf architecture.
One was an analysis of man's reaction to what he perceived to be man-made vs what he percieved to be created by nature. Behr tried to draw the conclusion that the golfer, even what he called 'the veriest tyro', was much less likely to be critical of what he perceived to be natural or looking like Nature than he would be to what he percieved to be put before him by some other man to test him.
Another was how the natural forces of wind and water worked upon the land to render landforms permanent or more permanent than others. Obviously structural integrity as well as the permancy and look of it was important to him in how it applied to architecture.
The problems Behr encountered both then and now is he was a very deep thinker as well as unfortunately a sort of convoluted and eccentric writer. Both obviously contribute to him being misunderstood or just dismissed both then and now.
Someone like Rich Goodale tends to completely dismiss Behr or make light of his ideas if he thinks he can challenge even an isolated assumption Behr may have made in Behr's a priori attempt to draw some interesting conclusions about golf and architecture.
What Rich Goodale unfortunately suffers from bigtime, in my opinion when it comes to understanding Max Behr, is both an intellectual arrogance of his own as well as an intellectual laziness when it comes to taking the time to understand where Behr was coming from and attempting to go with his essays.
Rich constantly tries to say that no golf course can be said to look completely natural particularly when it comes to features such as tees, greens, fairways and sand bunkering in certain parts of the world that are not indigenous. He seems to constantly fail to comprehend that Max Behr EXCEPTED features such as those from the capacity to look natural and spoke of their naturalness or the look of it only in degree.
It would appear that Charles Ambrose missed that point of Behr's too when he mentioned in the article above that to British eyes some of the bunkering Behr drew may not have appeared wholly natural looking.
Again, Behr spoke of and wrote about some of these things only in degrees of looking natural. The supreme irony was that Behr and others of his contemporaries, probably most notably Alister Mackenzie, were simply trying to develop a philosophy in architecture to ever increase naturalness and the look of it in their man-made features and the lines of them as the impliments and possibliites and the tools of their trade and art allowed for in the future.
That is why I personally feel that Mackenzie reached the greatest heights of encorporating naturalness into architecture before things came to a halt around the crash and depression.
However, there's good news in my opinon. I think the likes of Hanse, Doak, Coore & Crenshaw and some others of their architectural style and type have now actually surprassed Mackenzie (and also his contemporaries Colt, Alison et al) in using those advanced tools in many ways to create even more natural looking golf architecture.
But still there will be some now as back then who don't understand or don't care. Perhaps even Behr was wrong about the importance of naturalness in architecture and all that meant. But perhaps he wasn't wrong, perhaps he was right and that may be one of the reasons we are seeing such an interesting renaissance in a particular look and style of architecture today.