The museum commemorating the victims of the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Centre in New York is set to open to the public in 2012.

The US$45m (£29m, €35m) Memorial Museum, designed by Davis Brody Bond architects, will cover 120,000sq ft (11,100sq m) and will be located beneath the memorial plaza.

Visitors to the museum will enter through a glass-cased visitors' orientation and education centre located on the plaza above.

The museum will include a number of exhibits, some which are haunting reminders of the strikes - such as the iconic, 36-foot steel column that was the only piece of the towers left standing.

The column was initially removed after a nine-month recovery effort in 2002, but has now been reinstated and covered in a weather-resistant coating.

The museum will also provide a view of the remainder of the slurry wall and the foundations of the original towers.

The museum is part of a larger, US350m project of the site, spearheaded by the World Trade Center Memorial Foundation and the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation (LMDC).

The LMDC held a competition for the design of a memorial at the site and in January 2004, the scheme "Reflecting Absence" by architect Michael Arad and landscape architect Peter Walker was selected.

Davis Brody Bond was selected as the Associate Architect to execute the design of the Memorial in April 2004 and was later commissioned as design architect for the Memorial Museum in December 2004.