David - Thanks for the comments. Your statement:
"Where I think Behr and MacKenzie and Macdonald and others fundamentally differed with Crane wasn't with the severity of hazards, but was rather with the proper role of hazards and other features in the first place."
.. is correct. If you thought my point was something different, you might relook at those parts of my piece.
Then I'm glad I understood it correctly. Unfortunately the essay itself becomes a bit confused on the this point when it argues against the use of the term "penal" to describe Crane's approach in Part IV. , beginning with:
"To call such views “penal,” however, is misleading at several levels."First, it’s not as if one school of architecture employs penalties and the other doesn’t. Penalties and hazards are essential to both. All good strategic designs penalize missed shots, though sometimes the punishments are deferred.[4] Nor are strategically designed courses defined by kinder, gentler hazards. To the contrary, hazards on such courses are often more “penal” than those on “penal” courses.[5] In fact dramatic, unforgiving hazards were important to Behr and MacKenzie because of the added drama only draconian hazards could provide. Consistent with such views (and contra Crane), strategic architects in the Golden Age did not worry overly much about graduated hazards proportioned to fit the degree of a foozle. If I understand this paragraph correctly (and I may not) the argument here is that "Penal" is not the proper terminology because "penalties and hazards are essential to both" the Penal school and the Strategic school. But the point above was not
whether both schools use hazards, but
why they use hazards. Likewise, your discussion of the
severity of hazards is only tangentially related to the real distinction between the two schools, which is a fundamentally different view on the proper role hazards and features play on a golf course.
You then go on:
Another, perhaps bigger, problem is that the two concepts – strategy and penalty – operate at different levels of abstraction and as such fail to engage each other properly. Behr’s and MacKenzie’s favored “strategic school” defines a type of golf architecture in terms of its ultimate ends – the creation of strategic playing choices for the golfer. The disfavored “penal school” is defined by one of the means – penalties – used to achieve its goals – equitable venues for competitions. In long-running debates over architectural philosophies, the mere act of naming one camp as “penal” was to put its adherents at a disadvantage from the very outset. "Two different levels of abstraction?" Again, the essay seems to have lost track of what I thought was Behr's main point, which was to highlight the fundamentally different views on the proper role hazards and features play on a golf course. Besides, it seems the "problem" in levels of abstraction could easily be resolved by noting that the strategic school of design was a means to an end as well; to challenge the golfer mentally as well as physically. (In other words, to make the golfer think.)