The aggressively hip Thompson Hotels chain is making a further foray into the city’s luxury hotel market with a new 18-story, 142-room building on the Lower East Side designed by Ed Rawlings of Rawlings Architects.

The architect said he did not want the new Thompson LES to reference the neighborhood’s tenement past or nod to its glittering future, now getting under way with such projects as Bernard Tschumi’s Blue, an undulating 16-story condominium building on Norfolk, or the ultra-modern Hotel on Rivington.

“What we tried to do is create a building that is classically modern but broken down to scale of New York City a bit,” Mr. Rawlings said, placing the project closer to the international style of architect Louis Kahn. “It harkens back a bit to the mid-century kind of aesthetic, but updated with a kind of quiet modernism to it that hasn’t really been done in New York City before.”

Mr. Rawlings said he wanted to play the new building off a “kink” in Allen Street, where the road bends slightly to the west, as well as to the anonymous storefronts that surround the neighborhood, so the hotel appears to be “floating” above the street.

“Allen has this wonderful, tattered-around-the-edges quality to it, but also is this beautiful boulevard with green spaces,” he said. “From an urban planning point of view, it almost has a Park Avenue kind of feel.”

Thompson Hotels, the project’s developer, has made something of a name for itself by placing boutique hotels in thriving downtown neighborhoods around the country. Besides the new project on Allen Street, it has 60 Thompson in SoHo, the soon-to-be-opened 6 Columbus on Columbus Circle, and similar projects in Washington, D.C., and Beverly Hills, Calif.

“We are not a W or a Sheraton, where you can close your eyes and think you are in a different city,” one of the group’s three principals, Michael Pomeranc, said. “We are a luxury-hotel chain, but we are extremely sensitive to the integrity of the neighborhood and locale that we are in.”

Mr. Pomeranc conceded that the new hotel, with its rooftop swimming pool, spa, and high-end restaurant — whose precise incarnation is still to be determined — is something more likely to come out of Hollywood than Houston Street. But he said the project is riding the crest of a “movement of creativity in that neighborhood that you can just feel when you go there and that we feel we have joined.”

The Lower East Side “is almost like an amusement park of different venues for people to shop and talk and eat and drink,” he said. “It’s almost like Greenwich Village in the ’60s, with so much new art and new music. It’s like a bazaar of nightlife for the young and for people looking for a bit more creativity in the way they live their life.”

But the project has brought a torrent of criticism from locals and preservationists, who feel it is out of character with the lowslung buildings that have been the Lower East Side’s trademark for more than a century, as well as complaints about the slow pace of construction.

Mr. Rawlings, however, said the task of an architect is to avoid the kind of social criticism and nostalgia that many people engage in.

“New York City is a city that remakes itself. To freeze-dry a neighborhood is not what New York is,” he said. “The history of old tenement-style buildings is quite important, and I would never detract from that, and like anything else, creating a contract to that kind of history gives it a new kind of life.”

Neighborhood historian Joyce Mendelsohn, author of “The Lower East Side Remembered and Revisited” (2001), said she thought that while part of the neighborhood needs to be conserved, the northern edge of Allen Street is ripe for reimagining.

“I know my preservation friends are going to be upset with me, but you can use a different set of criteria for a bunch of deteriorating tenements on a wide, grand boulevard,” she said. “This is New York City. You have to keep a balance between preservation and progress.”

The $57 million project is scheduled for completion in early 2008.