By Jared Ebersole in Video 30 Oct 2026

The Times Square Hotel That Became Its Own Billboard

With ten colors of glass and a luminous curve through its tower, the Westin turned the struggle for attention into an unusually complicated facade.

At Eighth Avenue and 43rd Street, the Westin New York at Times Square faces a peculiar architectural problem: how does a hotel announce itself when the buildings around it are already shouting?

Its answer is a tower streaked with colored glass, apparently pulled apart by a sweeping curve of light. Above the advertising at its base, the building becomes another enormous graphic. You can read it before you read its name.

That is the tension behind this conspicuous corner of Manhattan. A hotel needs an identity, while the entertainment district around it trades in competing images. Arquitectonica, the Miami firm responsible for the design, brought that competition into the architecture itself. The result opened on October 18, 2002, with 863 rooms and an exterior that made quiet anonymity almost impossible. ALUCOBOND’s project account documents the opening and development team.

Where it is

The Westin New York at Times Square

270 West 43rd Street, New York, NY 10036, at Eighth Avenue.

The hotel’s official location page confirms the address.

The street was part of the brief

In Times Square, visual excess is partly a planning decision. New York’s Special Times Square signage requirements prescribe illuminated signs for qualifying developments along Broadway and Seventh Avenue, specifying their area, placement and brightness. The rules even connect occupancy approvals to the installation and operation of required signs. Light is treated as a component of the streetscape. New York City’s Zoning Resolution sets out those requirements.

Those provisions have a defined geographic reach. They should not be casually applied to every building carrying a Times Square name, including this hotel on Eighth Avenue. The Westin’s more specific context was the 42nd Street redevelopment project and its entertainment complex. Writing before the opening, architecture critic Paul Goldberger reported that redevelopment planners insisted on a substantial base facing 42nd Street, where advertising covered the lower floors. His account locates the pressure within the redevelopment scheme. Goldberger’s contemporary review describes that arrangement.

The useful distinction is between the signs and the tower above them. Advertising could give the lower levels their commercial energy. The hotel still needed a recognizable silhouette and surface. Its architects therefore had two scales to negotiate: the storefront world encountered on foot and the much larger object visible above the street.

A gesture big enough for the skyline

Arquitectonica won the hotel commission through a design competition. The firm describes the tower as two slender forms brought together, with a ten-story middle section connecting the tower to its retail podium. That intermediate volume uses angled geometry and a checkerboard of windows to create something resembling folded paper at building scale. Arquitectonica’s project description explains the composition.

The visual sequence matters. Shops and signs occupy the pedestrian’s immediate field of view. Above them, the angular middle section interrupts the transition to the tall glass shaft. Then the great curve gives the upper building a single, legible gesture. Each part offers something to catch the eye at a different distance.

The architects also carried the exterior’s colors and shapes into public spaces and guest rooms. The light motif rises through the interior atrium, making the facade’s dramatic incision part of a broader design language. The building’s identity was intended to continue after a guest crossed the entrance.

Read this way, the Westin is an exercise in architectural branding. Its most recognizable mark does not require lettering. The curved division and colored surfaces supply an image that belongs to the building, even when the advertisements below communicate something else.

The price of a painterly surface

Color makes the tower look spontaneous. Manufacturing it required careful classification.

Glass producer Viracon began sending samples to Arquitectonica in early 1998. The palette ultimately included ten base colors, ranging from copper and gold to violet, green, blue and aqua. Around 8,000 sheets of colored and clear glass went into the hotel’s approximately 184,000-square-foot curtain wall. The combination of color choices and curved geometry produced roughly 1,200 to 1,300 distinct panel types, according to Archiseek’s construction account.

That figure describes types, rather than 8,000 entirely unique finished assemblies. The distinction helps explain what builders were actually managing. A sheet of glass, an assembled curtain-wall unit and a panel type are different ways of counting a facade.

Contemporary reporting by Engineering News-Record identified approximately 4,500 curtain-wall units. Differences in dimensions, color, thickness and detailing left little repetition. Fabricated units received barcodes so they could be tracked through production and delivery. The curved light slot also complicated installation. ENR’s construction report documents the assembly process.

The apparent brushwork was therefore an inventory problem as much as an artistic one. A color occupying the wrong position could disrupt the intended composition, even if the piece otherwise appeared suitable. The facade had to work as a weather enclosure and arrive as a correctly ordered picture.

The lower building carries another material palette. ALUCOBOND supplied about 40,000 square feet of aluminum composite cladding in six custom colors. Arquitectonica served as design architect, HKS as production architect, and D’Agostino Izzo & Quirk designed the retail podium. The finished object brought together distinct architectural responsibilities and fabrication systems beneath one exuberant appearance. The manufacturer’s case study records those contributions.

Attention was easier than affection

Being conspicuous did not guarantee a warm reception. Goldberger’s 2002 review appeared under the title “Miami Vice” and questioned whether this might be New York’s ugliest building. That was one critic’s verdict, rather than a consensus among New Yorkers, but it captured the resistance the hotel provoked.

The Miami connection was literal: Arquitectonica was based there. Whether its colors felt appropriate in Manhattan was a question of taste. The harder architectural question was whether the tower could turn the district’s appetite for spectacle into a convincing building.

The Westin leaves that question visible. From a distance, its surface reads as a broad composition. Closer inspection reveals the repeated windows and carefully differentiated pieces needed to produce it. Its most theatrical quality depends on thousands of decisions that pedestrians will never individually notice.

A billboard can replace its message. Here, the message was built into the enclosure. More than two decades after opening, the Westin remains a useful place to examine what happens when architecture joins the contest for attention: the image becomes permanent, the manufacturing becomes complicated, and recognition arrives without any promise of affection.