New York Meets the Twin Towers

On January 18, 1964, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey unveiled an eight-foot scale model of architect Minoru Yamasaki's design for the World Trade Center, giving the public its first real look at the towers that would eventually dominate the skyline. Yamasaki, hired as lead architect in 1962, had been wrestling with how to fit ten million square feet of office space onto the site without putting up something that felt like a monolith. His solution was two square towers designed to rise 1,350 feet, surrounded by a cluster of low six-story buildings around a central plaza. The design still faced years of engineering, financing, and political fighting before any steel went into the ground, but the shape New Yorkers would live under for the rest of the century was already sitting on that model table.