ABSTRACT
The prospect of environmental mastery in the home raises a familiar theme, namely a fascination with nature's wholeness or plenitude. In common works of nineteenth-century domestic architecture and household economy, the characterization of figures in rooms and passageways or landscapes, though hardly novel in itself, engaged with other forms of literature and relatively new discourses, such as psychology and sociology, anthropology and ethnography. The widely promoted goal to balance diversity in form and moderation in composing the landscape of the Victorian house and garden, like the garden cemetery imposed a unique burden upon the inhabitants of the spaces. The 'greenhouse effect' is commonly thought to be a function of deforestation, hydrocarbon emissions or one or the other kind of human negligence. One can think of 'functionalism' as forming a theoretical trend, a school of thought or a style of reasoning practised or 'owned' by a given profession or design practitioner.
