ABSTRACT
Most of the philosophy of planning and design which we accept today as gospel was set out between 1896 and 1920 by four professional and four amateur golfers, none of whom had been trained in any of the disciplines associated with golf course architecture beyond personal experience of play. Presumably, through that ability, they recognized what gave pleasure, interest, excitement, boredom, irritation, or fatigue and steered a way through the problems of building the course with an eye firmly fixed on the eventual golfer. He is still the final judge. But they were soon preaching the virtues of variety, avoidance of formality and the imitation of Nature, which had inspired landscape designers of more than a century before. What they wrote has been rewritten again and again in differing forms but we have not added much new.
