The tower is located on Greenwich Street at the southeastern corner of the World Trade Center site.

The original building was a nine-story structure at the southeast corner of the World Trade Center complex.

The building's side facing Liberty Street housed the entrance to The Mall at the World Trade Center on the basement concourse level of the WTC.

[26] In the months following the attacks, architects and urban planning experts held meetings and forums to discuss ideas for rebuilding the site.

[27] The architect Daniel Libeskind won a competition to design the master plan for the new World Trade Center in February 2003.

[41][42] The city government offered to rent another 581,000 square feet (54,000 m2),[43] thus allowing Silverstein to obtain a mortgage loan for the tower's construction.

[43] As part of the project, Cortlandt Street (which had been closed to make way for the original World Trade Center) was planned to be rebuilt between 3 and 4 WTC.

[48][49] The three buildings would comprise the commercial eastern portion of the new World Trade Center, contrasting with the memorial in the complex's western section.

[52] In 2007, the PANYNJ started constructing the East Bathtub, a 6.7-acre (2.7 ha) site that was to form the foundations of 3 and 4 WTC.

[54] The PANYNJ was supposed to give the site to Silverstein Properties at the end of 2007; the contractors would have received a $10 million bonus if they had completed the work early.

[52][59] Meanwhile, police officials expressed concern that the building's all-glass design posed a security risk.

[60] A study published in early 2009 predicted that 4 WTC, the first of Silverstein's three towers at the World Trade Center site, would not be fully leased until 2014 due to the financial crisis of 2007–2008.

[66] Silverstein expressed confidence that the building would attract financial tenants since it was close to Wall Street.

[68] Three PureCell fuel cells were delivered at the World Trade Center site in November 2010, providing about 30 percent of 4 WTC's power.

[69] By the end of that year, the building had reached the tenth story; the project to date had been funded entirely by insurance proceeds.

[70] A New York state board voted in November 2010 to allow Silverstein to finance 4 WTC and another tower with up to $200 million of bonds from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009.

[71] Silverstein also wanted to sell $1.36 billion worth of Liberty bonds to fund 4 WTC's completion.

[86] A cable on one of the building's construction cranes snapped on February 16, 2012, dropping a steel beam 40 stories;[87][88] no one was seriously injured, and work resumed shortly afterward.

The building's basements were flooded in late 2012 during Hurricane Sandy, although the tower was still expected to be completed the following year.

[97] 4 World Trade Center had cost US$1.67 billion to build, having been funded by insurance payouts and Liberty bonds.

[99][100] Though the two governmental tenants collectively occupied around 60 percent of the building,[101][102] the Financial Times reported that some of the space could be subleased.

[109][110] According to The Wall Street Journal, these included a Super Bowl commercial, a film shoot for the 2014 movie Annie, and a wine-tasting event.

[98] The New York Daily News wrote that Maki and Associates wanted the building's design to "pay deference to the memorial".

[123] According to Engineering News-Record, Maki and Associates had designed 4 WTC as a "minimalist tower with an abstract sculptural presence".

Floors 7 to 46 each span 44,000 square feet (4,100 m2) and are parallelogram in plan, reflecting the shape of the World Trade Center site.

When the original World Trade Center was developed, the contractors found that there was a gap in the bedrock at the southeast corner of the site.

[54] The slurry wall is largely anchored to the bedrock, except at the southeast corner of the site, where the pothole made this impossible.

[98][134] Suspended from the lobby's ceiling is Kozo Nishino's sculpture Sky Memory,[119][135] which consists of seven pieces of titanium trusses collectively weighing 474 pounds (215 kg).

[138] When the building was being constructed, David W. Dunlap of The New York Times wrote that 4 WTC was "the biggest skyscraper New Yorkers have never heard of".

"[138] Upon the tower's opening, Daniel Libeskind wrote: "The WTC site has emerged from 12 years of contention and construction to become what we all hoped it would be: a place that will show the world everything that is great about cities, especially New York.