Tim Weiman;
You asked a good question when you asked what 'positive qualities' did the Kingsbarn site preconstruction possess?
It's often not easy to pick out interesting landforms, certainly small ones, when viewing photos but even if there really weren't any on the Kingsbarn preconstruction site, there could be the possibility of another very interesting aspect.
Certainly, the overall atmosphere of the area might have something to do with the aesthetics of the golf course's general area but that really doesn't exactly involve the ramifications of golf architecture and the details of it per se, in my mind.
But when most of us think of positve things for golf on raw sites we almost always seem to be talking about topography in one sense or another even if it's small in scale (as actually so much of TOC is).
And when we think of topography (contours) we almost always think of it in the vertical dimension in one way or another (perpindicular to the horizon, again no matter how small).
But it occurs to me that Kingsbarn could have done something else we may never think of. Possibly they have done two things with it that is rare today if done really well. First, perhaps they simply maximized their use of the HORIZONTAL! That to me would be maximinize the use of available WIDTH, in scale, in architecture and for golf. Width to me is one of the most valuable commodities available to any architect to make clever and interesting use of for golf.
So I certainly hope they did that as it would seem to be a tragedy not to if real width was available to them for routing. And if they could use real width in routing certainly they could design into that width and flattish scale anything they wanted to.
Then of course that would get to the second thing--what did they do to enhance the vertical dimension as that site certainly does appear to be sort of a flat blank canvas?
Imagine what a clever architect and really accomplished shapers could do there by producing a multitude of random small scale vertical features everywhere not unlike what TOC is naturally. That would seem to take a huge amount of creative work but it certainly could be done.
I was very surprised watching Gil Hanse shape some lovely little random contours on a green he did at Gulph Mills with what I thought seemed to be a pretty large blade so I know how it can be done. It took him awhile on a 5,000 sf green but just imagine if shapers who are as accomplished as Gil taking that basic look clear across a flattish site no matter how large.
Of course if it was done like some of the poor art and unnatural shapes that we see used in some architecture with parallel mounding and such with unnatural looking "lines" it would probably be a disaster aesthetically in relation to the overall "lines" of the kingsbarn area.
But maybe that's what they did there on a sort of blank canvas site--shape in a multitude of small scale random verticality and used some real width with it. If they did and really made it look to fit naturally to that preconstruction land somehow that would be really significant.
Whatever they did I hope they used the available width they had--the horizonal--to the maximum and for the sake of golf I hope it would be really wide. Width in golf and architecture is so valuable, in my book--not many have it anymore and even if they do they never think to use it, it seems.
Modern "shot dictating" architecture and "shot dictating" strategies in architecture really don't even seem to think width is necessary anymore as some architecture is so center line or middle oriented, so strategically one dimensional why would they even think width was necessary?
I've never seen Kingsbarn but I hope they have and also use real width on the holes and have a lot of interesting features and hazards going on inside that width to play around, short of, over, whatever.