The first is a real eye-opener: Mies before he went modern, a competition entry of 1910 for a monument to Bismarck. This is full-on, high-cholesterol classicism, a proposal for a vast public shrine to the great architect of German unity, jutting out from a clifftop high above the Rhine. The architecture is exactly the kind of thing that Hitler - a near-contemporary who at that time was a dosser in Vienna - later came to love. But Mies's proposal was too expensive. It did not win the competition. Mies and Hitler both served in the army in the First World War. They drew rather different conclusions from that experience, but later Mies tried to live with the Reich.

Now click forward to 1934. Despite everything, Mies is not in disgrace with Hitler's regime, and is still able to accept a Government commission. Always a lover of high-Prussian austere classicism as practised by Karl-Friedrich Schinkel in the early 19th century, his position is ambivalent. In this case, he has been invited to compete for the German Pavilion in the Brussels Expo. Understandably, given that his earlier German Pavilion at the Barcelona Expo of 1929 (now rebuilt) was a legendarily advanced and beautiful building which had brought the Weimar Republic huge international attention, and which marked a turning point in 20th century architecture.