It is meant to curtail "tower in a park" zoning that yields buildings vastly out of scale with their neighbors, too tall and set apart on barren plazas from the street wall formed by older structures.

Or it could produce a plan as monotonous, in its geometrically assertive way, as the barren concrete plazas that commercial developers typically use to hide the city's untidy innards.

Instead of swimming in the inert void of barren plazas, they are deftly knitted into the surrounding streetscape.

In June 2003, Mr. Arad submitted "Reflecting Absence," which carved out an enormous, barren street-level plaza featuring two square depressions 30 feet deep.

Jhingleshod guided them to a barren plaza near the head of the butte.

Fordham University has turned a barren, paved plaza at its Lincoln Center campus into a verdant, landscaped, sculpture-filled expanse.

Instead of huge towers around a huge, barren plaza, it might have a more human scale at ground level, more of a classic New York streetscape with some smaller buildings spaced more closely together.

The isolated and barren plaza has drawn few visitors over the years, though it generated a development bonus of 410,000 square feet of office space in a 3.6 million-square-foot building.

They understand that an endless grid of brick towers and barren plazas is dehumanizing.

The trade center, set not only at the tip of the island but also in a barren plaza, was always distant (even from up close).