Our firm won the 2008 CNU Award for our proposed urban design for Marion Square in Charleston, South Carolina. For hundreds of years, the buildings around it have been designed in the classical style. However, after years of decline the result was a hopeless mixture of small, mismatched buildings, a gas station, a drive-in bank and a parking lot where elegant, classical southern colonial architecture once stood. At the end of the twentieth century, the square was one of the least attractive and most used public spaces. Although the street grid was strong, the coherence of it was weak. The buildings along the corridors and connecting cross streets were decrepit or missing and there was little interest from the private sector in investing in what was obviously a nowhere part of town.