World Trade Center Site Tour - New York - 11:30 PM, Wednesday, 9th September 2026 - On the 25th anniversary of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, cultureNOW and Lower Manhattan Historical Association have organized a walking tour of the rebuilt New York World Trade Center. The tour includes the September 11 Memorial Plaza and the surrounding towers that comprise the 16 acre site that had been part of the WTC designed by Yamasaki in the 1970's. The evening tour will be primarily at street/plaza level and include the Tribute in Light, illuminating the night sky in advance of September 11 and the memorial events of that day.  Tour leader: Anne Lewison AIA is a practicing architect in New York City.  She worked on several key projects at the site over ten years including the September 11 Memorial Plaza and Museum Pavilion as well as the  PATH Oculus.

World Trade Center Site - After 9/11, there were several years of public debate, as New Yorkers worked to figure out how best to rebuild the World Trade Center site. It was necessary to take some time to develop a plan that reconciled the various constituencies` individual goals. In August 2002 The Lower Manhattan Development Corporation (LMDC) announced a competition for a master plan. Studio Daniel Libeskind design was selected in February 2003. The fourteen-acre WTC site will contain, in addition to the Memorial and the Museum, a Visitor Orientation Center, a new PATH train station, a Subway station, an underground retail concourse, an underground road network with security screening areas, five new office towers, and a Performing Arts Center. The WTC Masterplan serves as both the conceptual basis and the technical foundation for the entire complex re-development of ground zero. The Masterplan defines the spirit of the approach to re-building and creates a meaningful conceptual framework for the site. It also defines the spatial organization of all elements of the development within the site with an emphasis on the human experience and the public realm.The Masterplan dictates the location and massing of each program element, building height and relative size, as well as proximity and relationship to one another. The WTC Masterplan also supplies the framework for the site`s infrastructure, transportation, sustainability standards and security strategy and lays out the functional relationship between all the site elements with respect to the surrounding context of the immediate neighbourhoods and the surrounding city.

Reflecting Absence - World Trade Center Site Memorial - 2003 - The Memorial site is a public space for meditation and contemplation, centered around two reflecting pools that sit in the footprints of the original World Trade Center Towers. Lining the perimeter of each fountain is a parapet of victims’ names, arranged and inscribed according to a system of “meaningful adjacencies.” The pools are clad in Jet Mist granite, and the names panels are made of bronze that has been treated with a ferric based patina. At night, the names are illuminated from within. The fountains rest within a new plaza that acts as a sacred ground for those coming to honor the victims, while also integrating the Memorial into the surrounding city. 

World Trade Center Transportation Hub - 2016 - The first building completed at Ground Zero was the architecturally inspirational transportation hub with the Oculus as the iconic public entry to commect the disparate subway and PATH systems, and improve of east-west pedestrian connectivity. The goals also included a place for transportation, retail, and community in a way that had not been experienced in the past, while also providing simple and easy to navigate connections to the commercial components of the World Trade Center Site. The below-grade Concourses, transit entrances to Towers 1, 2 and 4, and the PATH Mezzanine with Platforms A and B, are now open to the public and achieving the civic goals established in the days when such things seemed almost insurmountable. 

1 World Trade Center - 2014 - The skyscraper is being built according to a revised design released in June 2005. The new design retains essential elements of the original plan-- soaring 1,776 feet into the sky, its illuminated mast evoking the Statue of Liberty's torch -- but features a smaller, cubic base set back further from West Street to protect the building against future attacks. Rising from its square base -- which will be constructed of impermeable concrete and steel -- the redesigned Freedom Tower will taper into eight tall isosceles triangles, forming a perfect octagon at its center. An observation deck will be located 1,362 feet above ground and there will be a square glass parapet at 1,368 feet, the heights of the original Twin Towers. From these, an illuminated spire containing a television antenna will rise to a final height of 1,776 feet. Other key elements include; 2.6 million square feet of office space, tenant amenity spaces, world-class restaurants, below-grade retail, and access to the PATH, subway, and World Financial Center. According to the Port Authority schedule, the tower is expected to open in the fourth quarter of 2013.

2 World Trade Center - 2008 - British architect Norman Foster of Foster and Partners was hired to design the new 2 World Trade Center, on the northeastern part of the World Trade Center site at 200 Greenwich Street, in May 2006. 

4 World Trade Center - 2013 - 4 World Trade Center belongs to a collective group of buildings founded on the redevelopment master plan by Studio Daniel Libeskind known as “Memory Foundations.” It is the first completed building on the original 16-acre World Trade center site and is the fourth of five skyscrapers intended to form a spiral composition of stepping buildings encircling the National September 11 Memorial Park. Provided a corner site, the project occupies is a full city block bounded by Greenwich, Church, Cortland and Liberty Streets and is adjacent two parks in a rare privileged setting within Manhattan. The building is prominently staged onto the Memorial Park on the west and faces Zucotti Park on the south-east corner becoming a portal to Wall Street and Lower Manhattan. The 72-storey building reaches a height of 977 feet (298 meters) and contains 2.3 million square feet (213,700 square meters) of office and retail space. The offices comprise 56-floors in two distinctly configured floor plates in three vertical sections. The larger of the two in the low and mid-rise sections is 44,000 square feet in the shape of a parallelogram echoing the configuration of the site. The high-rise section is 32,000 square feet in the shape of a trapezoid that gives the building a triangulated sculptural effect that is chiseled at the top. The form achieves a sense of a rotational pivot at the corner to contribute to its role in the formal composition of the master plan. The tower is designed to create a strong sculptural effect with a quiet presence. Seen from a distance, it can be identified as a minimalistic sculpture with its angular profile that distinguishes itself in the skyline. The building is clad in colorless silver glass that dynamically changes appearance depending upon the time of day, weather and light. It transforms itself from a distinct sculptural object to one that blends and becomes a part of the sky with a glazed and metallic materiality. Each of the 11,000 structurally glazed curtain wall units are detailed with a single lite of insulated glass that is 5` wide by 13`-6” high concealing the spandrel section at the floor / ceiling cavity via a horizontal touch mullion to enable the tower to express a highly abstract quality. To the contrary, the building reveals itself as a piece of architecture through space, tactile materials, their colors and refined details upon closer approach. Upon arriving at the base of the tower, one is unable to discern the large building as a complete entity. Unlike pure sculpture, the building clearly establishes a sense of place that is not only visual but one that is felt through rich spatial experiences.

3 World Trade Center - 2018 - The present building is located at the heart of the revitalised World Trade Center site in New York. The brief called for the design of a new commercial skyscraper to deliver a total of 2.5million sq ft (above ground area) designed within the guidelines of the previously developed Studio Libeskind masterplan for the site. The brief for 3 World Trade Center outlined the building’s function as the site’s commercial core and aimed to address the issue of balancing retail and office space, while also complementing and acknowledging the WTC Memorial. Tower 3 has an orthogonal relationship to the main space between the Memorial water pools and to further complement this relationship, the central zone of the building reduces in mass as it rises towards the sky. The effect is a stepped profile which accentuates the building’s verticality, relative to the memorial site and is sympathetic to the height and position of the neighbouring buildings. The design includes five trading floors, 53 office floors (totalling 2.5 million sq ft (232,255 m²)) of above ground area, five retail levels, and eight mechanical floors which serve trading and office floors, 44 passenger lifts and two principal stairwells. The lower section of Tower 3 – the ‘podium building’ – contains the tower’s retail element and the trading floors, and the upper levels hold the office space. The streetscape is activated by retail façades enabling free-flowing movement of shoppers between five levels of retail, three above ground and two below, served by two lifts and four stairwells. To maximise sustainability in terms of the building’s day-to-day functioning, similar ‘green design’ features as those included in the design of 7 World Trade Center have been incorporated. The design team ensured energy use and costs were significantly reduced compared to typical Manhattan office buildings, and has achieved ‘Gold’ Certification for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design from the U.S. Green Buildings Council.

7 World Trade Center - 2005 - Taller than the WFC, the new tower known as 7 World Trade Center replaced a chunkier building of the same name destroyed on September 11th. The new tower, by Skidmore Owings and Merrill, is more slender and elegant, and has won AIA design awards.

5 World Trade Center - 1970 - 5 World Trade Center was originally a nine-story office building built. The steel-framed structure was 118 feet tall with a black exterior.  The building featured an L-shaped design, housing a police desk and a major Borders bookstore. Notably, artist Joanna Gilman Hyde created a large rooftop mural in 1984.

World Trade Center (WTC) - 1970 - The original World Trade Center (WTC) was a large complex of seven buildings in the Financial District of Lower Manhattan in New York City. It opened on April 4, 1973, and was destroyed during the September 11 terrorist attacks in 2001.