Mies van der Rohe's unbuilt London tower would have been more than a modernist icon, it would have created the only useable space for protest in the City of London, says Jack Self in this Opinion column.

For the first time in more than 30 years, Mies van der Rohe's only UK project is being presented to the public ? in both a forthcoming exhibition at the RIBA and, if it is successful, a book funded through Kickstarter by the REAL foundation.
Alternatively referred to by Prince Charles as "a giant glass stump" and Richard Rogers as "the culmination of a master architect's life work", Mies' unbuilt Mansion House Square remains highly controversial, even 50 years after its conception. The project's failure to be realised is often blamed on a massive mood swing in the UK concerning how the public viewed modernist architecture. It is true that when the scheme was finally cancelled in the mid 1980s, it was right at the moment when historical pastiche and an obsession with preservation overthrew the postwar, predominantly brutalist paradigm ? one that was increasingly associated with social dystopias, not social democracy.
But is that myth actually true" Did the British really come to hate modernism generally and corporate modernist towers specifically" If so, how can we explain the explosion of precisely this type of building in the subsequent decades all around the City, from Lloyd's of London to the Gherkin or Cheesegrater" Was there perh...