In early 1962, when the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey officially authorized a plan to build the World Trade Center in Lower Manhattan, it came just months after President John F. Kennedy announced the U.S. goal of sending astronauts to the moon. The vision for the seven-building complex—which would cost an estimated $470 million (more than $4 billion in today’s dollars) and include the two tallest buildings in the world—embodied that same brand of American optimism and ambition.

The twin 110-story towers at the heart of the World Trade Center were designed to surpass New York’s iconic Empire State Building—then the world’s tallest building. Building the new towers would marshal unprecedented levels of design innovation, engineering prowess—and breathtaking risk.

1. A little-known Japanese-American architect was chosen to design the World Trade Center.

Born into a poor family of Japanese immigrants in Seattle, Washington, Minoru Yamasaki put himself through college working in fish canneries in Alaska. He started his career in New York, working for the firm that built the Empire State Building, and rose to helm his own firm in Detroit. By 1962, when Yamasaki applied to design the World Trade Center, he had completed work on a single high-rise building: Detroit’s Michigan Consolidated Gas tower, which had just 30 stories.

The Port Authority chose Yamasaki based on his proposal to design a vast trade center that still had the intimate, human-focused qualities of his other designs. Tasked with building the world’s tallest building, Yamasaki settled on a design of two towers and five other buildings that would together comprise some 15 million square feet of office space.

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