Paul Tillich and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe were exact contemporaries. Born in Germany in 1886, both opposed the rise of National Socialism and went into American exile in the 1930s. From exile, both engaged with the spiritual crisis of the modern age, proposing lasting ways to create, express, and understand meaning in modernity. And even though they initially developed their respective responses in Europe, it was only in America that these responses took on physical form in Mies’ architecture and intellectual form in Tillich’s theology. This study uses Tillich’s thought to provide a new reading of Mies’ architecture.