Wow, some of these posts personally remembering Herbert Warren Wind are some of the best posts I've seen on here--particularly Brad Klein, Bob Huntley and most particularly Chip Oat.
Tom MacWood is asking what Wind's influence was on architecture directly, though, it seems to me. Tom seems to imply that Bernard Darwin had more of a direct influence on architecture in an earlier era than Wind might have had a few decades later. Is that true? Even if Darwin did write about architecture far more specifically than Wind did, can it be said, proven and concluded that Darwin had some direct influence on the architecture and architects of his time and more so than Wind? If he did I've never been very aware of that. He certainly did write about it and very well but does that mean he had a very real influence on it?
How much more of an influence on architecture did people such as Macdonald have? People such as Crump, Wilson, Ross, and those that worked at it and wrote about it such as MacKenzie, Flynn, Thomas, Hunter, Behr, and others such as Colt or Alison? And in Wind's era such people as RTJ, Wilson, Fazios, Rees, Dye, and those that wrote such as Whitten, Cornish?
It looks like Wind may have warned about the negative effects of future distance but just somewhat. Did anyone pay attention to that and take heed and do anything about it architecturally in a positive sense to many of those old classic courses and what was getting built in the so-called "Modern Age?" Not that I can see!
Throughout most of the so-called "Modern Age" I can't really see that anyone did much about this problem we seem to fixate on now. What went on in the "Modern Age" of golf architecture (perhaps the 1950s to the 1990s) was an age of almost universal change and also the acceptance of that universal change! It doesn't look to me like anyone saw a problem during that era and Wind was one of the best chroniclers of that era and that change. Did he personally or even professionally agree with it all? From what some have said on here and even reported about what he said personally and wrote it wouldn't seem exactly so!
It's probably only up to us now to look back on those two eras and evaluate it in the light of all that went on during the evolution of it all and of a somewhat new and different era that seems upon us now in architecture. Why did apparently new eras begin to emerge and happen? Why did the so-called "Modern Age" of architecture start to cycle to somewhat of an end and usher in the beginning of what may be now called the beginnings of somewhat of a "Renaissance Era"?
For that I'd look to people such as Dye, Doak, and the others that are doing those types of renaissance work. And for writers that have influenced that perhaps those such as Whitten, Doak, Klein, Shackelford, Wexler, Bahto et al!
Why did such as RTJ veer from some of the architectural principles of the earlier era and go to more size, larger scale, more earth movement, more irrigation and more distance? And why did that cycle down to where we are now which seems to be a time of renewed concern about what happened in the last fifty years?
If you ask me that's just the way of the World--that's just the way it was meant to be in golf and architecture for a whole variety of reasons. I don't think there was anyone out there in the beginning of the "Modern Age" of golf architecture screaming bloody murder and warning anyone that they were destroying or corrupting things.
My own Dad who knew every bit as much or more about golf and probably architecture as I do was one of those who was recommending those changes of the "Modern Age". I'm a bit haunted by that but basically I have little doubt that if I lived in his era I would've done the same things as he did. And I have less doubt that if he lived in my era he'd be doing AND saying the same things as I am now.
Wind was just a very good chronicler of his era as Darwin was of his!