Assa determined to build a Times Square stand-out.

While not quite as kitchy as a Statue of Liberty keyring or an 'I heart New York' t-shirt, Solly Assa, CEO of Assa Properties LLC, has gone to great lengths to insure that his extraordinary new 45th street hotel will stick in the craw of tourists.

The 39-story building, stark white and glass obelisk will appear to be balanced on an eight story podium where images of popular New York destinations will be projected from humungous black screens in rooms, and then deflected abstractly using ambient light onto the exterior.

"In the last ten years, with buildings like Bilbao at the Guggenheim going up, architects have more freedom and clients are looking to them to develop branding images, and more iconic architecture," said Hale Everets, senior architect at TenArquitectos, the firm that designed the building with Cetra Ruddy Inc. "That, combined with the saturation of condos in New York, propelled us to really want to create something distinct."

The building's primary means of distinction when it is completed sometime next year will be the podium in the loom-woven, 1-inch stainless steel mesh that wraps the main portion of the hotel, where rooms should run from $700-$900 a night.

"The mesh gives the building its monolithic appearance. It makes it scaleless, much different from conventional architecture where you clearly have floors and windows separated from each other," Everets said.

The architects hope the curtain wall fwill provide guests with a remedy for the space crunch of midtown and keep them from feeling squeezed by the building's narrow floor plate. Guests will have the choice of leaving their wall-sized windows clear, muting them with a translucent scrim or a blackout curtain to provide them with a "veil of privacy." They can also choose to have images of their favorite destination, such as the Empire State Building or Chinatown, projected from the ceiling onto the screen.

"We want the guests to feel they are experiencing something special, we want them to feel from the minute they walk through the door they are experiencing something unique," Assa said.

Floors 9-24 will be occupied by condo hotel rooms, and floors 24-39 will be occupied by condos which will run between $900,000 and $15 million dollars.

Guests at the hotel and residents of the condos will have full access to the hotel's amenities including massage, food service and babysitting. "This is probably the first iconic building of this caliber," Assa said.

"We think that people nowadays are more appreciative of design and amenities and will understand immediately that this is a very unique product."