E.W. GODWIN, FORGOTTEN MASTER OF NINETEENTH-CENTURY AESTHETIC MOVEMENT, MIRACULOUSLY BROUGHT TO LIFE IN NEW YORK.

At one time, a walk down Tite Street in London in early evening with a view into the lighted interiors of half a dozen artists' studio houses would have told the story of the life and times of the architect Edward William Godwin (1833-1886). Failing that, since only two structures remain, a visit to an exhibition in New York called E. W. Godwin: Aesthetic Movement Architect and Designer achieved the remarkable goal of conveying his pivotal but nearly forgotten career as an architect, interior decorator, furniture designer and theatrical producer.

Organized by the Bard Graduate Center for Studies in the Decorative Arts, the show was mounted in galleries that also happen to be beautiful rooms in one of Manhattan's midblock Beaux-Arts limestone mansions. Susan Weber Soros, who founded the Bard Graduate Center in 1993 for the study of the cultural relationships between the decorative arts and society, was herself the scholar and guiding light behind this exhibition that revealed Godwin's multi-faceted professional life.

He began his practice in Bristol specializing in ecclesiastical and Gothic-Revival municipal architecture and ended at the threshold of a Modernism based on the simplicity and asymmetry of Japanese design. In 1998, Soros, who also maintains a residence in London, completed a doctoral dissertation at the Royal College of Art 'The Secular Furniture of E. W. Godwin', now a catalogue raisonne published by Yale University Press. This beautifully illustrated and annotated volume along with the exhibition catalogue (also Yale), for which she enlisted essays from nine other specialists, will guarantee that this highly creative and colourful personality will no longer be overshadowed by William Burgess, William Morris or others of his generation. (See Mark Girouard's review of the books on p96).

One of the curiosities of the nineteenth century, when travel for education was usually restricted to visiting ruins in Britain, France and Italy, was how exotic influences and objects from the East, specifically those from Japan, were embraced and reinterpreted in the decorative arts without a thorough understanding of their original context. In a sense, Godwin did for furniture what Rene Lalique in France did for jewellery by taking recognizable Western forms and rearticulating them to suggest a new linearity and composition that was unmistakably Eastern. Most of traditional Japanese furniture consists of storage chests, but these are often decorated with hinges and other intricate hardware and stacked in formations that are conveyed in Godwin's c1877 elegant, two-tiered sideboard of ebonized mahogany with brass handles that was the centrepiece of the show. A side table, long on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, with staggered, folding shelves, fretwork stretchers and delicate brass fittings, took on a new life seen in the context of his other Anglo-Japanese work.

By incorporating not just drawings and photographs of buildings but also wallpaper samples, textile designs, ceramics, furniture and decorative schemes among the 150 exhibits on view, Bard succeeded in creating a kind of theatre in the round, an inside/outside look at the Aesthetic Movement's intense engagement with artistic style. Rarely do shows on architecture and design rise to this level of selectivity that makes the work both understandable and memorable. Photographs and drawings of his Northampton Town Hall (now the Guildhall) in the Neo-Gothic style based on Ruskinian principles were next to the thronelike mayor's chair in oak with inlaid decorations that gave the measure of the building with its bandings of coloured stone and figures of kings and queens on the facade.

Godwin's theatrical productions and costumes filled one gallery of the show. Between his two marriages, he lived with the actress Ellen Terry for six years, and their red brick house in Hertfordshire was a laboratory of new ideas about bare floors and curtains. The dollhouse-like elevation and plan was annotated so clearly with his innovations that a visual wander through gave an excellent picture of how they lived.

But no one had it better than the clients on Tite Street, Chelsea. The first version of the house he designed for James McNeill Whistler was rejected by the Metropolitan Board of Works but, even so, the finished product in white brick with a high, green-tiled mansard roof has the austerity of Modernism. But in designing his true masterpiece, for society portraitist Frank Miles at no 44, he composed a facade of interlocking rectangles of balconies and windows that recall the asymmetrical geometry of traditional Japanese teahouses. Even in the modified version that was built, his system of solids and voids, reflected in the interiors as well, would find its way someday, as the catalogue suggests, into the work of Le Corbusier.