NEW YORK (AP)  -- Several blocks south of the site where the World Trade Center once stood, visitors to a new exhibit can get a brief impression of what it was like to stand close to the fluted walls of the twin towers and gaze upward.

Carol Willis, director of The Skyscraper Museum, says she used to do that.

``Whenever I looked at the twin towers, sometimes they'd be lost in the clouds, and I could feel their tremendous power,'' says Willis, an architectural historian. ``The architectural thrill, to me, was to stand at the base and look straight up those pinstripe columns, a quarter of a mile in the sky.''

That sense of grandeur, said the architectural historian, is part of what ``Giants,'' the exhibit opening on Wednesday at the museum in lower Manhattan's Battery Park City, seeks to convey.

Using a combination of video and audio presentations, original architectural and engineering models and other visual displays, the exhibit traces the history of the trade center from its inception in the 1960s to its years as New York City's dominant landmark, visible from three states.

One section of the display is a wall simulating the towers' own

22-inch wide steel columns, separated by 17-inch glass windows. Reflected in the room's stainless steel ceiling, the lighted columns seem to rise endlessly upward, just as the real ones did.

Blowups of photos and newspapers retell the trade center story in starkly graphic ways.

One wall-size aerial photo shows the twin towers as they neared completion in the early 1970s, already dwarfing the rest of the Wall Street financial center's tallest skyscrapers and closely packed buildings from the early 20th century.

A reproduced front page of The New York Times of Jan. 19, 1964, has as its centerpiece the announced plan for two towers, the ``world's tallest buildings,'' to be built on a site then occupied by ``radio row,'' a neighborhood of small electronics shops.

The exhibit, to run through February 2007, also includes several scale models of the trade center, including the original one created by architect Minoru Yamaski, and a wind-tunnel test version used by chief architectural engineer Leslie Robertson.

There are no photos or other displays dealing with the towers' destruction by two terrorist-hijacked jetliners on Sept. 11, 2001. ``We felt that that event was being properly commemorated at ground zero,'' Willis said.

Willis, who teaches architectural courses at Columbia University and founded the Skyscraper Museum several years ago, recalled watching the collapse of the towers from her apartment balcony in midtown Manhattan.

Like many other New Yorkers, she had found the towers impressive but not particularly likable. ``I respected them for their engineering advances and their scale of ambition, but I had no affection for them,'' she said. ``My favorite skyscraper has always been the Empire State Building. That is the iconic building of New York City.''

At more than 1,350 feet the world's tallest when built, the

110-story twin towers were later topped by Chicago's Sears Tower, the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia and Taipei 101 in Taiwan. But none ever had matched the 4.7 million square feet of each tower.

A key message of the exhibit, she said, is that the twin towers were products of economic and social forces that prevailed then, but would not be built today in a time when the trend is toward buildings that seek to incorporate street commerce and activity.

The Freedom Tower, the planned central skyscraper of the rebuilt trade center site, will be 1,368 feet _ the same as the trade center's north tower _ although with its spire, the skyscraper will be 1,776 feet tall.

Willis considers the redesigned Freedom Tower ``a handsome building that will work well with New York's skyline,'' and said the idea espoused by some to rebuild the twin towers as a symbol of defiance was wishful thinking.

``I think it's impossible that we'd ever build on the scale of the twin towers again, because they were so damn big. It was the culmination of a moment in the 20th century, in the 1970s, and it doesn't keep getting larger and larger. We found the maximum, and it was this generation of supertalls.''