But it's actually more startling and intriguing to find Wynn at the base of the same gargantuan resort property, on a patio outside the Wynn Las Vegas' ice cream shop where the gleaming bronze-glass tower is separated from a 140-foot, man-made mountain by a 30-foot-wide river. There, the hotel visionary seems dwarfed and consumed -- literally and figuratively -- by his own creations, awed that they ever got built and, surprisingly, not nearly as larger-than-life as might be expected from someone whose place in Vegas lore is more secure than anyone of his era.

Mostly, though, he's defensive -- and very annoyed. His new creation was received by some travel writers and architectural critics not with the awe they greeted his Mirage in 1989 and Bellagio in 1998 but with questions about why it cost a record-breaking $2.7 billion and with mocking of Wynn's over-the-top boasts that this resort is the most complex structure ever built. Yes, ever.

And yet, Wynn doesn't back down. On an exclusive tour with Wired News this month, the 63-year-old hotelier goes further than ever, exclaiming "The engineering and the coordination of putting those two things together -- the tower and the mountain -- make a pyramid of Egypt look like a Lego toy! A Lego toy!"

It's that sort of comment that gets Wynn, 63, into trouble. Comparing a Vegas casino -- each of which is likely to be imploded and rebuilt, by the next century anyway -- to the world's greatest and most enduring structures is an invitation to snickering, even if it might actually be true. But if others question whether his Trump-like hubris has brought him this backlash, Wynn himself wonders why few have asked him to explain the claim.

If they had, they'd hear a litany of technological firsts and construction challenges at Wynn Las Vegas that do seem to put it in a league of its own in Vegas and in America, if not worldwide. Among its novelties, the place:

* Provides the world's largest distribution of HDTV, sent into the rooms without individual antennae via high-speed Cat-6 ethernet cables

* Offers the biggest use of VOIP technology for hotel phones

* Is among the first casinos to install computer chips inside gambling chips to detect counterfeiting

* Is the first in the industry to combine the room key and the casino frequent-player card in the same piece of plastic.

And then, of course, there's the mere feat of building the place, which Wynn and his builder insist was, at the time it went up, the largest privately funded construction project in the nation. By contrast, the budget for whatever will rise at ground zero in New York is $1 billion less than the cost of Wynn.

The Wynn Las Vegas sits on 215 acres once occupied by the storied Desert Inn Hotel, where then-owner Howard Hughes shut himself in for years in the 1970s. After perfecting the concept of offering a free street-side spectacle with the Mirage's fiery volcano and the Bellagio's soaring dancing fountains, Wynn decided six months after the October 2002 start of construction that he'd ax a plan to build a special-effects lake that would have stretched to the edge of Las Vegas Boulevard. Instead, he opted to shelter his hotel with a mammoth $120 million mountain so passersby would have to come inside to see the goodies and so that nothing across the street could ever alter the vistas he was trying to present.

"The entire logistics of the project had to be rearranged," recalls builder Tony Marnell Jr., CEO of Marnell Corrao Associates, which also built Bellagio, Mirage and several others. "Then we had to figure out how to build it. We'd never done this before."

The key issue was staging. With major thoroughfares on each side -- the Las Vegas Strip and Sands Avenue -- and a 49-story building rising just 10 yards away, Marnell said the mountain "had to be built on top of itself." That meant using a fleet of Liebherr and Manitowoc cranes, rarely found in this part of the United States, that are capable of lifting more than 300 tons at sharp vertical angles.

Yet the mountain isn't just a tall mound of dirt. It also boasts eight waterfalls and, on the hotel side, four distinct "environments" carved out to provide the backdrop for four of the restaurants and the nightclub. Outside two of those eateries is the Lake of Dreams, a three-acre expanse with a 70-foot wall where a free light and music show goes off every half hour starting at 9 p.m.

"This is one of several indoor-outdoor patios," Wynn says at the ice cream shop, Sugar and Ice. "It's part of a 5.8 million-square-foot building. Next to it is what? Thirty feet of water? And then straight up here is a 100-foot waterfall. Five to 10 thousand gallons a minute coming over the edge. That requires a big, huge gravity-fed system. A huge cavity room there with heavy engineering is in that section of the mountain -- and it's one of several. This mountain is faceted all the way around, and each section of that structure is not only a complex building that's clad with an artificial rock and hundreds and millions of pounds of real trees, the stuff on top -- the big trees -- weighed as much as 200 tons to put up there, each!"

As the tour moves along to the Daniel Boulud Brasserie at the edge of the Lake of Dreams, Wynn notes the expanse is filled with 4,400 LED lamps on the floor, "plus bubblers and a false floor."

"Everything in between the two structures is a special-effects platform," Wynn exclaims, his rising voice drawing confused glances from oblivious tourists. "That is why it was the most complex, daunting thing. And it nearly broke Tony Marnell's back in terms of complexity."

Marnell noted that the mountain also presented another challenge: It weighs as much as one of the World Trade Center towers, so something had to be done to keep it from literally tilting the Las Vegas Strip. They used a "engineer-fill foundation" that essentially spread the weight out beneath the earth to balance it out.

"Building a skyscraper in New York City is way easier than this," Marnell says. "With (a) skyscraper, you have small, manageable components. You're not dealing with creating water and fire features or moving 100-year-old trees. The hotel is an integration of practically all known common technologies, as well as as large an array of known materials and effects. That complexity in that amount of time (30 months) is very challenging."

Wynn is equally excited about the in-room communications that he says have set new standards. The resort has been criticized by travel journalists for not offering Wi-Fi in the rooms for use with a guest's laptop, a decision Wynn Resorts CIO Karen Bozich insisted has garnered few guest complaints.

Instead, Bozich said, the property wanted to focus on other functions, such as being able to offer HDTV in all 2,716 rooms. In suites, the remote control integrates the functions of an attached DVD player.

"The unique thing is that the signals are fed over ethernet cables instead of typical coaxial cables," says John Schneider with Cox Communications' Hospitality Network, the unit of the Vegas-based company that has furnished TV services for 18 of the world's 25 largest hotels, all on the Strip. "The nice thing about the platform is that it's much more capable of adding things to it. And the system will allow the hotel to treat each guest individually. Putting this in a hotel the size of Wynn, it's just never been done."

Bozich said the use of VOIP for the phones is a similar accomplishment. The buttons arrayed on the full-color phone screen have different functions depending on the screen and offer much of the same information conventionally found in hotel room guides. But the information on the phone console can be updated more easily -- the printed guide offered incorrect show times for the hotel's "Le Reve" production for months after the show's schedule was altered.

The casino didn't escape innovation, either. To combat counterfeiters, gambling chips valued higher than $25 contain radio-frequency identification chips made by Gaming Partners International that indicate the chip's value. Wynn isn't the first on the RFID bandwagon -- the Hard Rock Hotel in Las Vegas also has them -- but it's the biggest such effort, with the chips inside 650,000 gambling chips representing $600 million.

Wynn Resorts Chief Financial Officer David Sisk said the measure doubled the cost of the chips to about $1.90 each and altogether cost about $2 million, including the scanning equipment at the casino cages. It's paid off, though, with no counterfeiting incidents in the property's first four months.

Wynn's competitors acknowledge that the hotel is, at the very least, the most complex structure in Vegas. In fact, they say, the scale of Vegas endeavors is often undervalued by the rest of the world.

"We so routinely build projects of enormous complexity that we sort of take it for granted," says Alan Feldman, spokesman for MGM Mirage, which owns 10 resorts in Vegas including three -- Mirage, Bellagio and Treasure Island -- built by Wynn. "Many of the buildings in Las Vegas would be the most complex in any other city in the country."

That said, Feldman predicts Wynn's moment atop the heap of Vegas structures will be short-lived. MGM Mirage is about to break ground on a $4.7 billion, 66-acre, 18 million-square-foot casino, resort and residential high-rise complex just south of Bellagio that Feldman says will "make building the Wynn look easy."

Wynn says bring it on.