I am far from convinced a very obviously man made feature is necessarily representative of poor architecture......
In general though, I think too much emphasis these days is placed on seamless transitions between nature and man.
Ciao
Sean,
I thought about this one a while over the weekend, starting Sunday morning, having my coffee on my patio, looking at my obviously artificial waterfall, but enjoying the heck out of in nonetheless. This, after spending a summer 44 years ago working for a landscape firm whose specialties included waterfalls for homes, or entrances to subdivisions, office parks, etc. The designers took great care to hide the source of the water, believing it enhanced the naturalness of it, and I bought that premise, placing a sharp turn in the stream before the fall to put the pump behind a mound, adding shrubs and overhanging scotch pines over the stream, etc. It never seemed to dawn on them that the collection pond wasn't natural looking, or it would flow somewhere further downstream and out of sight, but I guess no one goes to Niagara Falls and looks downstream.
And why do I mention this? Your comment above, and a realization that I still greatly enjoy my waterfall, even though it is (by the nature of the space available) only a 20 foot long, 6 foot deep BMU covered with nicer stones production. Why? I like the look and sound of flowing water, and the designer put it up close and personal where I could enjoy it.
As it applies to golf design, I guess every gca is a sum product of all things they have experienced. So, I come from a landscape design program at University of Illinois. Their most famous graduate was Hideo Sasaki. His most famous quote is, "The earth is putty." Add in apprenticing under two U of I grads, also typical of the 1950's golf as landscape architecture school, which was defined then (the environmental codas date from Earth Day 1970) "arranging landscape elements for specific human uses."
Short version, if you look at a lot of my work, yes, I am not afraid to leave "very obviously man made features" as parts of my design. I recall a philosophical discussion with a golf architect critic, who thought my work was sort of "Japanese" style. In Japanese gardening, there are lots of really artificial elements, and the eastern mindset is that the eye will fool the brain into seeing them as natural. My reviewer noticed that if I wanted to turn a fairway, I had no hesitation to just build a mound/earth form to back up, support, turn the fw, even though it was fairly obvious it was built. Why? Because I thought people participating in the specific human activity of (public) golf probably needed or at least appreciated it.
And practically, what is the other option? I think we have discussed it before, but either you build what you need and stop, or you try to enhance the illusion of natural by extending the artificial contours all the way down the fw to convince the eye that was the landscape before you put the golf hole in. Obviously, the compromise solution is to just build the earth form to the dimension to turn the corner, and then try to make it look naturalistic, in part by tying slopes in more gracefully as possible, something I have failed to do on occasion. That might be what you are referring to as a "seamless" transition and in limited doses, of course it's worthwhile.
On the other hand, it is also true that the most noticeable elements in any art, the highlights of a scene are often the incongruous ones, and sometimes, you may be better off artistically by accenting the land in just the right places.
As to your water/bunker idea, first, I question the idea of a hazard guarding a hazard, but sometimes do them on longer approach shots. Many have tried beach bunkers as a tie between land and water, but they really don't stay in place long. You have to build a shelf below water to hold the sand in, any drain tiles are by default under normal water level and thus don't work, and the capillary action of water in sand makes the bottom of the bunker wet, i.e., the save bunker sometimes gets so hard the ball bounces or rolls though to the water anyway. I agree it would be nicer to really over shape the bank below the bunker to preclude mowing, but it doesn't happen all that often.
Lastly, yes, transition slopes off greens are something I have learned (but still have to point out to shapers sometimes) that is important. The last 10 feet of green needs to "swoop" up at less than 10%, and the first 10+ feet outside the green can gradually increase from 10-20%, but if you go from 3% green to 30% mound just off the green, you create a constant mowing problem.