A 3D reconstruction of the World Trade Center and Lower Manhattan.
The Twin Towers and the neighbourhood around them, as they stood in September 2001. The towers are reconstructed from published dimensions; everything around them is real building footprint and street geometry from OpenStreetMap, curated back to how the area looked that year.
Not clad boxes. Their appearance came almost entirely from the facade, so that is what is modelled: 59 aluminium-clad columns on each face, standing proud of the glass line. That is why they read as solid silver from an angle and showed their windows only head-on. At the base each column forked into a three-storey “trident”, which is what produced the pointed arcade at plaza level.
The reflecting pools of the 9/11 Memorial are built on the original tower footprints, so their corner coordinates give both the tower centres and the exact rotation of the street grid here — 29.11° east of true north. The towers come out offset diagonally by 67.0 m east and 103.8 m south, which leaves the documented 130 ft gap between their facing walls as an independent check.
The sun is placed from real solar geometry for 40.71° N on 11 September, so shadow directions through the day are the ones the site actually had.
Footprints, streets and water © OpenStreetMap contributors, licensed ODbL. Rendering with three.js. Source on GitHub.