General Informations

The original World Trade Center was a complex with seven buildings featuring landmark twin towers in Lower Manhattan, New York City, United States. 


The complex opened on April 4, 1973, and was destroyed in 2001 during the September 11 attacks. The site is being rebuilt with five new skyscrapers and a memorial to the casualties of the attacks. As of November 2011, only one skyscraper has been completed, with four more expected to be completed before 2020. One World Trade Center will be the lead building for the new complex; reaching 100 stories[2] and becoming the tallest building in New York City during April 2012, it is expected to be finished by 2013. A sixth tower is still awaiting confirmation to be built.
At the time of their completion, the original 1 World Trade Center (the North Tower) and 2 World Trade Center (the South Tower), known collectively as the Twin Towers, were the tallest buildings in the world. The other buildings included 3 WTC (the Marriott World Trade Center), 4 WTC, 5 WTC, 6 WTC (which housed United States Customs), and 7 WTC. All of these buildings were built between 1975 and 1985.
The complex was designed in the early 1960s by Minoru Yamasaki and Associates of Troy, Michigan, and Emery Roth and Sons of New York.[3]The twin 110-story towers used a tube-frame structural design. To gain approval for the project, the Port Authority of New York and New Jerseyagreed to take over the Hudson & Manhattan Railroad, which became thePort Authority Trans-Hudson (PATH). Groundbreaking for the World Trade Center took place on August 5, 1966. The North Tower was completed inDecember 1972 and the South Tower was finished in July 1973. The construction project involved excavating a large amount of material, which was later used as landfill to build Battery Park City on the west side of Lower Manhattan. The cost for the construction was $400 million ($2,300,000,000 in 2012 dollars).[4] The complex was located in the heart of New York City's downtown financial district and contained 13.4 million square feet (1.24 million m2) of office space.