Tom, I know that you are not the biggest Raynor fan on the site, but certainly Raynor took advanatge of "marketing." It was perhaps the best form of marketing possible: golf writers and golfers in general spoke highly of Macdonald-Raynor courses, and then in city after city people asked Raynor to build golf courses. So while you obviously do not like template-based design, it impossible to argue that Macdonald's product was not wildly succesful.
You can't say template-based desinged wasn't EVER marketed well. How many courses did Seth Raynor build? 100 in 15 years? That is GOOD marketing!
Bill:
I think I've restored as many of Raynor's courses as anyone, so saying I'm not a fan of his work is not quite right. I just don't think his method was genius, and that other architects should copy him.
As for "marketing," I'll concede your point ... in fact I will go further. Template design is 99% marketing. There are two parts of this business. One is finding work; the other is doing it. Building template holes is usually about the former, not the latter; that's why it bothers me. It's not an artistic statement at all, much less the highest form of the art, as Gib would have it.
I wouldn't apply that same standard to C.B. Macdonald; he came up with the idea of templates, and he was the founder of half the courses he built.
TD,
Yeah, I caught with the use of the word EVER.
As a fan of Macdonald, Raynor and Banks, and having a somewhat twisted sense of humor, I LOVE the paradox that Seth Raynor presents to you.
Your study of courses, especially including the courses that inspired Macdonald's templates, makes you extremely qualified to restore a Raynor course. Yet when it comes to building your own new courses, it would have killed you to have been restricted to the MacRaynor formula.
Macdonald was a visionary and that he KNEW that building "18 great holes" would be a extremely well-received by the market. Of course the potential market was vast: there were cities all across the US demanding new golf courses. Seems to me that almost every major city in the US had room for one or two MacRaynors, and still leave plenty of work for other architects and styles.
To JK's original question, the MacRaynor market is just about exhausted, save for a few special desitination sites like Bandon and Streamsong.